| AN AFFAIR OF LOVE Director: Federic Fontéyné "I think when you remember an important love affair that you had, it's very keen and sharp, like a diamond in a box. Sometimes you remember one color in particular. At the beginning, the film was blue, the cold blue light of winter. Little by little, as we were working on the set of the hotel, the color became red because the hotel was where there was the most tension for them." Frédéric Fonteyne The original title of An Affair of Love was "A Pornographic Affair" but since that title was almost guaranteed to get the wrong audience (i.e. the trench coat crowd) the distributor changed it to a more innocuous title. Unfortunately, the film itself is way too innocuous (or dull) and drags along for 80 minutes giving the audience little reason to stay around and see what transpires. What it does give the audience is a vacuous dose of talk, one annoying sex scene that feels out of place and a lot of relationship ennui. The direction by Frédéric Fonteyne is competent and - as in many French films - the soundtrack is good but it isn't enough to enthrall audiences who expect something more romantic like current art house favorite The Girl on The Bridge or something smarter like the recently released Alice and Martin. The premise is a sexual arrangement between two anonymous strangers who agree to meet once a week at a central location, have coffee then go to a hotel and satiate their sexual desires for a while. Besides being a premise that has been done too often and much better (Last Tango in Paris comes to mind) it doesn't tell us anything new about this type of situation.. It's easy to guess from the first scene how the affair will transpire and how it will lead to one of them becoming dissatisfied with the arrangement and trying to do something to change it. On the plus side An Affair of Love does deny us a Hollywood ending, which I suppose is a good thing but that's not enough to recommend it. This leaves only the two performances by Nathalie Baye as the woman and Sergi Lopez as the man, which are above average even though you can tell they are acting - especially in the cloying "documentary" style interviews that are used to tell the story. If anything An Affair of Love proves that relationships are basically the same in France as they are here, but more disheartening it proves that not all French psychological romances are worthy of U.S. distribution. - Matt Langdon |