Coeurs (2006)
Directed by Alain Resnais

Film Review

The Master returns - not to cheer us, but to break our hearts.  Despite being comfortably into his ninth decade, Alain Resnais still hasn't lost the knack of making films that reward the eye, stimulate the intellect and stir the soul. After his deliciously stylish musical comedy, Pas sur la bouche (2003), the elder statesman of the French New Wave serves up another irresistible feast of a very different kind, a tragicomic portrayal of solitude that manages to be both witty and poignant.  Well-received by the critics, the film garnered no fewer than eight nominations at the 2007 Césars ceremony, although it did not win a single award.

Coeurs is closely based on Alan Ayckbourn's 2004 play, Private Fears in Public Places (which is the English language title of the film).   Resnais had previously adapted another of Ayckbourn's stage plays for his 1993 film Smoking / No Smoking, and would end his career with an adaptation of Ayckbourn's play Life of Riley entitled Aimer, boire et chanter (2014). Here, Resnais regulars Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma are partnered with Lambert Wilson and André Dussollier, repeating the remarkably successful ensemble of the director's earlier On connaît la chanson (1997).

The characters that we find in this film are typical of Alain Resnais' distinctive brand of cinema.  At first, they appear to be caricatures, even grotesques, living in an artificial world that is barely two steps from a vaudevillian stage show or children's fairytale.  But, as we are drawn into the story, the cosy artifice - which is at its most extreme in the minimalist Mélo (1986) and Smoking / No Smoking - melts away and the characters are revealed to be genuine human beings experiencing real difficulties that we can all identify with.

Here the theme is loneliness, the abiding curse of our era.  There's a startling irony in the fact that at at time when technology has made it easier than ever before to communicate, people are finding it harder to connect with one another.  The fact that the characters in this film are all so likeable adds to the bitter poignancy of their predicament.  There is nothing in Resnais' oeuvre to date (excluding his documentary short Nuit et brouillard) that compares with the abject bleakness of the ending to this film.  This is the sad reality of our time.

Film Synopsis

Estate agent Thierry is having a hard time trying to find an apartment for a problem couple, Dan and Nicole.  Each evening, Dan, an unemployed ex-army man, spills his bucket load of sorrows into the ears of friendly barman Lionel, whose sole domestic preoccupation is looking after his cantankerous old father.  Whilst Thierry secretly hankers after his office colleague Charlotte, who is more interested in religion than romance, his sister Gaëlle fritters away her life in a fruitless search for her beau idéal on the internet...