‘Three Friends’: Venice Review

Dir: Emmanuel Mouret. France. 2024. 118mins

“Synchronised love is rare,” says the pragmatic Alice (Camille Cottin) to her best friend Joan (India Hair). Joan has fallen out of love with her partner Victor (Vincent Macaigne) and feels that staying with him would betray his trust. Alice never loved her husband, Eric (Gregoire Ludig), but pretends to do so and claims that it all works very well. Meanwhile, mutual friend Rebecca (Sara Forestier) is having an affair with Eric. This Lyon-set relationship drama by Emmanuel Mouret explores the rocky terrain of modern mating: unbalanced affections, truth versus deception, infidelity. It’s not exactly new territory for French cinema but, while the picture is unlikely to stand out from the pack stylistically, it is carried by a droll, crisply perceptive screenplay and lively, fleshed-out performances.

An effective showcase for its three leads

This thematic landscape – the myriad ways that lovers either connect or destroy each other, the multiple different readings on the same relationship – is one that evidently holds an enduring fascination for Mouret. Previous films include the 2022 Cannes-premiering Diary Of A Fleeting Affair, which followed a relationship between a single mum and a married man; the multi-chaptered comedy of sexual manners The Art Of Love (2011) and César-winning The Things We Say, The Things We Do (2020), which dealt with yet more adultery.

Three Friends might not have anything particularly new to say about the subject and it’s certainly not daring in its approach. But it’s an engrossing journey – like binge-watching an entire series in one sitting. Fans of Woody Allen in his late ’70s to mid ’80s heyday will likely appreciate this film’s dramatic rhythms and fascination with the knotty mess of human relations.

The boldest of the film’s formal devices is an archly self-aware narration that feels a little too quirky for comfort at first, but takes on a deeper emotional resonance once we learn about the fate of the character delivering it. To say any more would be to unleash the mother of all spoilers. Suffice to say, disaster strikes one of the couples whose lives are intertwined, and the ramifications of this – the grief, the guilt, the shadow of sadness cast over future relationships – is one of the key elements that the film explores.

It’s to the credit of the accomplished screenplay, which Mouret co-wrote with Carmen Leroi that, while the picture is sensitive to the ripple effects of a tragedy on the lives around it, the film is neither bogged down in the more melancholy aspects nor flippantly dismissive of them. Rather, the zesty energy and bittersweet humour of the writing is the takeaway.

There are some choices that seem uninspired. The score, for example, is full of the kind of generic fussily unchallenging classical music that feels as though it was bulk-purchased, in the same way pubs buy books by the yard to provide ready-made ambiance. Others are more successful. Mouret weaves a motif of silent film comedy into the picture, with several of the characters attending an enviably well-programmed rep cinema. The pratfalls of Buster Keaton provide a neat visual metaphor for the romantic travails of the characters: hopes and dreams are built up, only to be dashed back down again, the cycle repeating itself over and over.

It’s a welcome symbolic flourish in a picture that is otherwise shot in a rather functional, flat manner. It’s possible, of course, that visually neutral backdrop and unshowy camerawork is a deliberate choice designed to foreground the performances – and on that level, it works. This is an effective showcase for its three leads, with Cottin, Forrestier and Hair fully inhabiting their roles as persuasively flawed, frequently unreliable and occasionally courageous women.