Lover for a Day | Little White Lies

Lover for a Day

19 Jan 2018 / Released: 19 Jan 2018

Two young women standing in an urban setting, one wearing a patterned skirt and the other a plain T-shirt. The image is in black and white.
Two young women standing in an urban setting, one wearing a patterned skirt and the other a plain T-shirt. The image is in black and white.
4

Anticipation.

No one is doing intimate relationship dissections like Philippe Garrel.

4

Enjoyment.

Another great addition to one of the director’s strongest runs.

4

In Retrospect.

Packs a whole lot of nuance and romantic consideration into its bracingly curt run time.

French auteur Philippe Gar­rel returns with anoth­er con­sum­mate­ly craft­ed rela­tion­ship drama.

Svel­te­ly con­struct­ed, stark­ly mono­chrome, and fer­vent in its treat­ment of amorous mat­ters, Lover For a Day com­pletes what feels like a per­fect trip­tych of minia­tures from post-Nou­velle Vague auteur Philippe Garrel.

It fol­lows Jeal­ousy and In the Shad­ow of Women, and is anoth­er 70-odd minute film that’s tight­ly con­struct­ed while always con­vey­ing the emo­tion­al messi­ness of the tan­gled rela­tion­ships at its core. These late films may super­fi­cial­ly resem­ble the aver­age Gal­lic diver­tisse­ment in terms of con­tent, yet Garrel’s own apho­rism that cin­e­ma is Lumière plus Freud” holds truer than ever.

The open­ing scenes estab­lish a set­up that’s marked­ly more high-con­cept than usu­al for him. Mid­dle-aged teacher Gilles (Éric Car­ava­ca) and his much younger stu­dent and lover Ari­ane (Louise Chevil­lotte) make off to a fac­ul­ty-only area to have a breath­less quick­ie against a bath­room wall. Then we are intro­duced to Gilles’ daugh­ter Jeanne (played by Garrel’s daugh­ter Esther – his films are fre­quent­ly fam­i­ly affairs), cry­ing while drag­ging a noisy roller suit­case through an emp­ty Paris street at night.

It’s the kind of econ­o­my of ges­ture that’s com­mon across Garrel’s exten­sive fil­mog­ra­phy; before learn­ing that Jeanne’s boyfriend has bro­ken up with her, we feel the loss acute­ly through the sharp con­trast of inti­ma­cy and lone­li­ness, nar­row cor­ri­dors and expan­sive streets, ecsta­t­ic gasps and con­vul­sive sobs of heartbreak.

Jeanne’s dis­cov­ery that her father has a new lover the same age as her (23) ini­tial­ly exac­er­bates the pain, but soon both her and Ari­ane form a gen­tle
alliance rather than a bit­ter rival­ry. You’ll get over it. We always do,” the more expe­ri­enced Ari­ane tells Jeanne, and it’s these terse words of hard-earned wis­dom that encap­su­late the emo­tion­al tenor of the film, which might be best described as depres­sive screwball’.

Gar­rel doesn’t wring a lot of dra­ma from the premise, and when he does, it’s delib­er­ate­ly sub­dued. With its diaris­tic sec­ond-per­son nar­ra­tion and clipped, stac­ca­to rhythm, the lm has the fleet-foot­ed essen­tial­ism of Robert Bres­son, minus the fatal­ism and inten­tion­al­ly blank per­for­mances. Indeed, both Gar­rel and Chevil­lotte are lumi­nous phys­iog­nom­ic oppo­sites, and each dis­play a nat­ur­al expres­siv­i­ty that’s enhanced by Rena­to Berta’s lush 35mm black-and-white cinematography.

In such a crys­talline con­text, moments of dis­crep­an­cy stand out, par­tic­u­lar­ly a scene involv­ing Jeanne and her friends gath­ered at a bar debat­ing the Alger­ian war with an old­er bar­tender. In a less rig­or­ous film, the scene would be a throw­away, but in this case the digres­sion from psy­chodra­ma serves as a reminder that intro­spec­tion shouldn’t come at the expense of polit­i­cal con­scious­ness and a sense of history.

Lover For a Day even­tu­al­ly offers a con­cise overview of Garrel’s aes­thet­ic and the­mat­ic gestalt in a brisk and com­pact pack­age, and as such, it’s an ide­al entry point for new­com­ers to the direc­tor (this is a long way from the lit­er­al and fig­u­ra­tive desert of 1972’s The Inner Scar, for instance). It’s a mod­est­ly scaled and emi­nent­ly approach­able addi­tion to his fil­mog­ra­phy – as ephemer­al as its title sug­gests, but just as lovely.

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