Should you watch this at weekday movie ticket prices? Yes.
Should you watch this at weekend movie ticket prices? If you like French films.
Score: 3.5/5
Secret ending? No.
Running time: 113 minutes (~ 2 hours)
“Un plus une” is a French romance about two people, already in existing relationships, who find themselves in a complicated friendship. It stars Jean Dujardin (Antoine Abeilard), Elsa Zylberstein (Anna Hamon), Christopher Lambert (Samuel Hamon), and Alice Pol (Alice Hanel). It is rated R-21.
What strikes you most about “Un plus une” is how raw and authentic the emotion is. It’s a thought-provoking film that makes you question your most basic assumptions about human emotions, a love story that’s told as a story of the human condition. Fortunately, a talented cast pulls off this insightful and metaphorical story, which could easily have become inaccessible to the average audience.
Highlights
Heartfelt, genuine depiction of love
Love, in all its myriad forms, is explored in the film, even if it doesn’t call out the romance as such. Both the beauty and pain of love are shown, rather than giving a romanticised view of passion. That’s what makes the relationship between Antoine and Anna ring true to us. There’s no easy way to quantify what they feel, and no simple resolution to the situation they find themselves in — which is precisely what love is in real life.
The spontaneity of life
Both protagonists know more about each other through the most random circumstances. Again, this speaks to how raw and complicated human relationships can be. The couple find themselves off on random tangents and attend various activities as they explore life. And through that exploration, they discover the metaphorical meaning of their feelings for each other. It’s difficult to pin down this quality of the film, but the best way to describe is that it’s lifelike in a way you’ve never seen before.
Interesting setting
India is a location with plenty of mystique, and what heightens the appeal of the country is that it’s viewed through a French lens. The film doesn’t make India out to be a mystical land of incomprehensible voodoo. Instead, it respects their culture as much as it respects French culture, and treats it like just another country. The foreign setting is not an Asian stereotype in a Western film for once!
Letdowns
Confusing dream sequences
You’ll be questioning whether events really happened because the dream sequences keep popping out of nowhere. The problem is that the film always misleads you into thinking the dream sequence is reality, and blurs the line between truth and fantasy. That causes you to constantly doubt the veracity of events since you’ll be wondering which part of that scene was real, and which was just a dream.
Indistinguishable flashbacks
Very often, the film will use some prop to segue between scenes, like a phone ringing, for instance. Except that the segued scene is a flashback and only revealed much later. There’s no filter applied nor any signal to show that it’s a flashback. Coupled with the indiscriminate dream sequences, you’ll be constantly confused about the sequence of events and what actually happened.
“Un plus une” is a film that shows the reality of love, in all its pain and beauty.
“Un plus une” opens in cinemas 23 June, 2016 (Thursday).
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