Thursday, April 17, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Audrey finds amour fou in He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

By Jeannette Catsoulis

As Audrey Tautou's elfin face glows from the center of a shot filled with roses and, chirping with pleasure, she chooses one, you may think you've stumbled into Amélie, Part Deux: Le Marriage. But before you run screaming from the theater, be advised that this latest outing from France's answer to Meg Ryan is more Fatal Attraction than Sleepless in Seattle--which doesn't mean that running is not an excellent idea.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is essentially a two-act play. Tautou is Angélique, a talented artist, and the rose is for Lo•c (Brotherhood of the Wolf's Samuel Le Bihan), a humorless cardiologist and the object of Angélique's obsessive affections. Act one shows her simpering at Lo•c's picture on the nightstand and sending him extravagant gifts, while her friends (Sophie Guillemin and Clément Sibony) attempt to derail her frenzy of besottedness. Neglecting the paintings she needs to produce for a crucial scholarship, Angélique singlemindedly harasses fate in the direction of her romantic longing.

But something is not right. A trip to Florence is planned and she waits alone at the airport; a birthday dinner is cooked and ends up in the trash. Where are the lovers' trysts, the tender moments? Just when we are convinced this is a one-sided fantasy, we see Lo•c emerge from the restroom at a cardiology conference, a beaming Angélique trotting at his side. And on the wall in his office, where his patients skew toward bored and wealthy women--all of whom seek attention to their hearts, and, one suspects, muscles farther south--we notice one of Angélique's paintings. Thoroughly confused now, we watch as Lo•c lovingly greets a visibly-pregnant wife (Isabelle Carré). Breathing heavily from across the street, Angélique watches too.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is a clever stunt that would have played much better as a lively, 20-minute short. First-time director Laetitia Colombani (she also wrote the script, along with Caroline Thivel) asks a delicious question: What if Amélie were really a lunatic? Since this is so clearly a sub-text of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's candy-colored 2001 hit--and what so many of us have always suspected--the use of Tautou's demented radiance to caricature the earlier film is an inspired notion. There's even a cheeky scene where Angélique deliberately neglects to water a prize-winning rose bush. Amélie would've been désolée.

And it might have worked, but for two things: Tautou's inability to look threateningly, as opposed to adorably, nuts; and Colombani's inability to quit while ahead. In act two, the movie rewinds and begins again from Lo•c's point of view; but events don't simply replay, they do so with more depth and significance, made richer by the glimpses of Lo•c's cozy domesticity. Our early assumptions about this buttoned-up philanderer are turned on their heads, and the script smartly resolves some tricky inconsistencies.

But instead of taking a lesson from Hitchcock (or even, God help us, Adrian Lyne), Colombani seems unaware that less can be more, and act two spins rapidly into whacky luridness. House-trashing and home-wrecking, suing patients and suicide attempts, murder and miscarriage jostle for screen space as Jér™me Coullet's gooey score trills ironically in the background. By the time we see Angélique, eyes glittering, slicing a wedding-dress into fluttering chiffon streamers, it's all too much; He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is a gimmick that has gone too far.