The Names of Love (Le Nom des gens) | Review

Provocative but never audacious, haywire but never transgressive, French writer-director Michel Leclerc’s spirited romantic comedy The Names of Love is only intermittently funny, but often amusing. The semi-autobiographical story follows the unlikely love affair between a mixed race, wildly leftist, sexually promiscuous Algerian girl and a buttoned-up medical examiner with a specialization in fowl disease and unresolved issues with his Jewish heritage. Leclerc and co-writer (and partner) Baya Kasmi are so impressed with their unconventional pairing and its symbolic implications that they forget to present any serious obstacles to the relationship. Despite this dramatic sidestep, the movie’s quick pacing and unabashed sincerity, along with the bountiful charms and abundant nudity of actress Sara Forestier, make for a comfortably challenging entertainment.

Nubile, effervescent Sara Forestier plays 20-something Baya Benmahmoud, the offspring of a middle-class French mother who is a flighty, if fervent left-wing agitator, and a Muslim immigrant who works as a commercial painter but has the aesthetic sensitivities of an artist. Forestier’s Baya is a mess of conflicts and a daughter of impulse — politically hardheaded and sexually uninhibited, she has made it her life’s mission to “convert” right wing hardliners by getting them hard. But when she meets Arthur Martin (a solid, likable Jacques Gamblin), a socially conservative but politically left-leaning scientist twice her age, sex becomes something more than just an anti-fascist weapon.

Every romantic comedy worth its salt needs to make the audience fall in love, and here The Names of Love succeeds triumphantly. Forestier captivates with her lively eyes, her knotted bursts of energy, and — it is worth mentioning again — her careless, constant, knee-buckling nudity. She is so infatuating that she nearly makes you forget how insufferable her real-life equivalent would likely be.

Unapologetically influenced by Woody Allen’s comedic dissections of neuroses-rich relationships, the movie plays fast and free with a flashback heavy structure, mixing elemental childhood experiences with adult complexes. There are numerous direct addresses to the camera, which for the extroverted Baya make sense, but for the introverted and tight-lipped Arthur come across as a contrived misstep. In an obvious, sometimes jarring, nod to ‘Annie Hall,’ the movie at times even includes the adult characters candidly discoursing on provocative themes with their effortlessly precocious younger selves. Even Marshall McLuhan’s famous cameo in the Allen film is echoed here, in an awkwardly over-indulged appearance by failed Socialist French presidential candidate Lionel Jospin.

Unlike Allen, however, Leclerc is very much invested in sociopolitical issues of class and race. The movie doesn’t shy away from critiquing Muslim fundamentalism or questioning the necessity for Jewish slavishness to the past. A highlight of the film is a scene where a teenage Arthur calculatedly uses his grandparents’ deaths in Auschwitz to earn the sympathy and attention of girls.

The movie is most successful when it moves away from shorthand sloganeering and instead depicts the way the way the personal and the political clash in people’s daily lives. One of the best sequences alternates between the families of both Baya and Arthur as they not-so-discreetly switch the TV channels to avoid programs that address the various elephants that haunt their domestic spaces: Holocaust death camps in one instance, the scourge of pedophilia in the other.

North American audiences might be disarmed by the fact that a comedy this breezy and fun could so matter-of-factly deal with the issue of childhood sexual abuse. It’s hard not to chalk up this conspicuously off-center attitude to merely being “very French.” It’s also very refreshing. There is nothing frivolous about the way the film handles the disturbing issue of pedophilia. Quite the opposite — the movie doesn’t merely compartmentalize the abuse as a backstory bullet point that way most American screenplays would. Instead, Baya’s adult self is seen, with both her charms and her hang-ups, as an irreversible product of that abuse.

Leclerc’s movie reflects a general European perspective that is not afraid to see pain and pathology as the essential building blocks of personality, as elements that do not necessarily detract from the uniqueness of a person, but instead contribute to it. Baya’s pathology is part of her attraction, not its nemesis.

Odd and surprising, though never completely fulfilling the promise of its ambitious premise, The Names of Love might be the summer’s best weekday matinee escape.

Rating 3 stars