Along Came Love – first-look review

At a funer­al, a char­ac­ter reads out the deceased’s favourite poem; it’s a blaz­ing, lone­ly love poem that artic­u­lates the pri­vate space where pas­sions light up the night. ​“For where secrets exist, life also begins,” says the char­ac­ter in a voice strong enough to force back the tears threat­en­ing to fall. 

The life force cre­at­ed by keep­ing a secret proves to be light­ning fuel in Katell Quillévéré’s post-war French fam­i­ly dra­ma that takes the same epic sprawl­ing form as her bril­liant 2013 film, Suzanne. At a pro­gramme of the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val full of films wrestling with the evil deeds of the Nazis, Along Came Love starts from an intrigu­ing niche with­in this preoccupation. 

In his 4.5 hour opus, Occu­pied City, Steve McQueen includes the fact that local women who had rela­tion­ships with the occu­py­ing Ger­mans were dubbed ​‘Kraut Whores’ fol­low­ing lib­er­a­tion. These women had their heads shaved and swastikas paint­ed on their bod­ies in the course of humil­i­at­ing pub­lic spectacles. 

A black and white pro­logue depicts this before the film switch­es to colour and we meet Madeleine (Anaïs Demousti­er) and her child on a beach in the 1950s. Five-year-old Daniel has raced into the sea and is brought back to his moth­er by a help­ful stranger. This proves to be the chicly frag­ile phD stu­dent, François (Vin­cent Lacoste, look­ing every inch the French Paul Dano).

François woos Madeleine by show­ing up at the restau­rant where she wait­ress­es – clad in a gar­gan­tu­an bow – and buy­ing them both cham­pagne. Both are watch­ful char­ac­ters who inch into their pas­sions with one eye on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of dis­as­ter. The halt­ing chem­istry between Demousti­er and Lacoste is thrilling. He toasts to kairos, explain­ing it as a Greek term mean­ing ​“the luck you catch on the fly”. The col­lat­er­al dam­age here is Daniel, whom Madeleine treats with abrupt­ness. She is unmoved when they light a can­dle in church and he says that his prayer was that she will love him one day. ​“I for­bid you to ruin my hap­pi­ness,” she snaps at him after he runs off on their wed­ding day.

Work­ing from her own screen­play, co-writ­ten with Gilles Tau­rand, Quil­lévéré charts the course of this mini fam­i­ly as the years fly by. Each new episode is writ­ten, shot and act­ed with such vivid­ness that the lulls between nar­ra­tive reveals nev­er feel frus­trat­ing. Mad­dy, François and the patho­log­i­cal­ly over­looked, Daniel, are com­pelled to start again after a man from François’ past burns down their apartment. 

Their new life involves run­ning a bar fre­quent­ed by Amer­i­can GIs and earns them a new friend, the charm­ing, African Amer­i­can, Jim­my (Mor­gan Bai­ley) who wins them over via a whiskey sour recipe. His appar­ent care­free ease is a rev­e­la­tion to two peo­ple who move through life like rab­bits in the head­light, and leads to per­haps the most tragi­com­ic three­some ever com­mit­ted to film.

Peri­od details present with sub­tle author­i­ty through not just cos­tume and pro­duc­tion design, but by a social con­ser­vatism that colours char­ac­ters who are too ashamed to admit core truths. Mad­dy and François are bound by an inti­mate under­stand­ing that tran­scends words so that their scenes are tex­tured, full of glances and har­mo­nious movements. 

Dia­logue is writ­ten as a dance, nev­er as expo­si­tion. Heads are kept down for as long as is human­ly pos­si­ble which, it turns out, is not for­ev­er. Along Came Love essays a type of bond where shared secrets even­tu­al­ly erupt, caus­ing both tragedy and release.