Love Songs.

"Christophe Honoré's Love Songs is in many ways a conscious rediscovery of the tradition of the French musical, engaging most specifically with Jacques Demy's masterful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," writes David McDougall in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Love Songs uses the same three section titles as Umbrellas, but like the rest of the film's explicit Demy-references they are put to an independent purpose. Which is to say, Honoré keeps his homage mainly in his back pocket, leaning less on postmodern form than on postmodern social mores."

"The musical numbers are restrained and not especially showy, but their tact makes them feel more rather than less self-conscious," writes AO Scott. "Still, for all its imperfections, Love Songs is a worthy and intriguing experiment, the latest sortie in an international rescue operation aimed at saving musical cinema from extinction or self-parody. Like other movies that have been involved in this undertaking - Once, say, or Hedwig and the Angry Inch - Mr Honoré's film is likely to inspire ardent love among its admirers. The rest of us may envy their passion."

Updated through 3/24.

Also in the New York Times, Kristin Hohenadel profiles Louis Garrel, "the youngest member of an esteemed French cinema clan that includes his grandfather, the actor Maurice Garrel, and his father, the director Philippe Garrel (who cast him as a 5-year-old in the 1989 film Emergency Kisses). His mother is the actress Brigitte Sy, and the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud is his godfather."

In the Voice, Scott Foundas looks back to "Jean-Luc Godard's 1961 bed-hopping meta-musical, A Woman Is a Woman... [which] effectively launched a distinctly French subgenre of minimalist song-and-dance anti-spectaculars that would come to include work by Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), Chantal Akerman (Window Shopping) and Jacques Rivette (Up/Down/Fragile)." Love Songs is "Honoré's first full-tilt genre outing, and while his earlier films were hardly devoid of their own show-offy cinephilia (Dans Paris aped Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films in the way Love Songs apes Godard), this one has been stripped of everything but its pastiche; it's as if Pulp Fiction had wandered into Jack Rabbit Slim's and never left."

And Michelle Orange talks with Honoré and Garrel.

For the IFC, Aaron Hillis asks Garrel, "Are there any sure-fire songs for seducing a woman?"

Slant's Ed Gonzalez nods to Demy and Godard, too, and sees another relation: "AIDS does not rear its ugly head, but through Julie's death, Love Songs reveals itself as a kissing cousin of André Téchiné's trenchant The Witnesses, evoking how people are brought together by their attempts to transcend tragedy, reclaiming their soulfulness and living for the future."

"You could describe Love Songs, in fact, as a blend of François Truffaut's wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar's acrid polysexual comedy, which were never far apart to begin with (given the difference in climate and native temperament between France and Spain)," suggests Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. Also honorably mentioned: "Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's underappreciated 1998 AIDS musical, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy."

Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "As an implicit longing for a cinema of white, Parisian, middle-class intellectuals, Love Songs often feels like a rusty trinket; that it hasn't yet completely lost its luster is thanks in no small part to its vibrant portraitures, steeped in the heartsick pangs of young love."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Honoré "about reinvigorating the musical, his thoughts on Sarko L'Americain, and how he and Wes Anderson are both still really nine-and-a-half year olds."

Four "L"s in the Magazine from Mark Asch.

Earlier: James Van Maanen; and reviews from Cannes.

Updates: "Honoré has proven you can make a movie musical in which style doesn't upstage content—a movie musical that blossoms from the inside out," writes David Edelstein in New York.

"For all his skill and intelligence, Honoré flattens Demy's grace into perfume-ad chic, thus, falling short of the essence that made movie-musicals once seem miraculous," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

"[T]he film would actually have worked, and been better off, in my opinion, if it didn't feature any of its 14 songs at all," proposes Christopher Campbell in Cinematical.

Update, 3/20: "Honoré's project is more ambitious than, say, François Ozon's candy-colored confection 8 Women or Alain Resnais's Not On The Lips," writes Jürgen Fauth. "Love Songs isn't an ironic revisiting of the genre but a serious attempt to push it into new territory."

Updates, 3/24: "Frankly, the music isn't that great, and like a lot of Honoré's audacious gambits - a burst of fast-motion action here, a Chris Marker-like succession of still photos there - the 'bursting into song' bit comes off as too intellectualized," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Love Songs is definitely daring, but too much of it seems calculated to lead up to a final line about how to guard against grief: 'Love me less, but love me a long time.'"

Lisa Rosman talks with Honoré for indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at March 19, 2008 3:17 PM