“Any couple in love should remember that love can’t last,” says one viewer halfway through “Three Friends,” shrugging off a spurned kiss with impeccable French confidence. If everyone were so sanguine about such matters, most love stories wouldn’t exist. And a film like Emmanuelle Mouret’s dry romantic comedy, in which consenting adults groan and groan over semi-acceptable adultery, would certainly be more modern than it is. Mouret’s film, which explores the sexual and emotional entanglements of three Lyon friends in their forties—two married, one single, and their lives incomplete—would hardly be considered new, either in his own filmmaking or in the French subgenre of adultery, but it’s an easy, adult-friendly delight.
Mouret has been making variations of this formula since his debut with Laissons Lucie faire! in 2000, once dipping into heritage cinema with 2018’s Lady J but otherwise sticking to a reliable model of contemporary relationship studies that tends to attract the cream of French acting talent. Though a fixture in his homeland (2020’s Love Affair(s) earned 13 César nominations), his work has only intermittently crossed over to international arthouses. With its Venice competition showing as Mouret’s first time at the top level of the Big Three, Three Friends may elevate his auteur status, though it marks neither a formal nor thematic departure for him.
As for the film’s influences, they reveal themselves from the start: jazzy piano, black screen, central white titles in a serif font eerily close to Woody Allen’s Windsor Light Condensed. As much as Allen has borrowed from the likes of Rohmer and Truffaut throughout his career, the French have returned the compliment in the form of homage, if not always so transparently. With the sequence of affairs and betrayals centered on a close female trio, intermittently narrated by a secondary male character, the superficial similarity to Hannah and Her Sisters is obvious, though “superficial” is the right word: Moret doesn’t delve too deeply into his characters or their shifting desires, though he moves them around with some verve.
The film’s narrator is Victor (Moret regular Vincent McKean), the loving husband of high school English teacher Joan (India Hare), who is beginning to feel suffocated by his unwavering devotion. “It’s hard to tell where the story begins,” Victor says in his voiceover. Similarly, Joan doesn’t know exactly when she stopped loving her sweet, endlessly supportive husband, but she’s certain that there’s been a fundamental change of heart. When she confides this to her colleague and best friend Alice (Call Your Agent star), she expects a shocking response. Instead, Alice casually notes that it’s perfectly normal to be married but not in love: She’s looked at her husband, Eric (Gregory Ludig), with a dispassionate affection for years, and that suits her just fine.
The trick, Alice says, is to make your husband think you’re as in love with him as he is with you. What she doesn’t know is that Eric is in a long-term relationship with Alice and Joan’s unmarried art-student friend Rebecca (Sarah Forestier), who regularly confides in her friends about her troubles with her frustrated mistress, but without naming any names. Unable to accept Alice’s idea of a marital settlement, Joan confesses her feelings to Victor, whose reaction ranges from acceptance—constructive, mature, to denial—to self-destructive pain. As Joan reluctantly puts her marriage behind her and befriends her new colleague and neighbor Thomas (Damien Bonnard), who fears that something more might be up, Alice plunges headlong into the pool of infidelity, only to have her emotional composure crumble for the first time.
Moret’s screenplay, co-written with Carmen LeRoy, weaves these fine threads into a stylish portrait of Renaissance relationship politics—at least among the urban bourgeoisie these films tend to center around, with their cozy knitwear, movie dates, and spacious, book-filled homes. There’s no subplot that leads anywhere, which is particularly striking, though there are some clever, honest observations along the way about the hypocrisy that often comes with loosening marital restrictions—Eric may feel comfortable having an affair, but he’s nervous about the idea that his wife or mistress aren’t exclusive. Moralizing is rare, though some characters inevitably conclude that home is where the heart is after all.
What’s missing is the kind of character detail that, as in Allen’s best work, would elevate this banality from amusing to poignant, though all the actors nail their comedic message with finesse—even McKean delivers an early blow to the heart when he realizes his marriage is over through no fault of his own. Three Friends is dense: Moret’s direction is brisk and businesslike, with little expressive flair in Laurent Desmet’s soft, slightly faded lensing or Benjamin Esdravo’s delicate, keys-and-strings score, which is heavily peppered with familiar classical pieces by Mozart, Ravel, Mendelssohn, and more. Sometimes, as Allen notes in the recurring shark metaphor in Annie Hall , that’s enough to keep things moving along, and that’s true of relationships and filmmaking alike.
