neumu [ cinematronic ]




	Love Me If You Dare
	Yann Samuell Guillaume Canet, Marion Cotillard, Thibault Verhaeghe, Joséphine Lebas-Joly, Gérard Watkins, Emmanuelle Grönvold, Laetizia Venezia, Gilles Lellouche, Elodie Navarre, Julia Faure, Frédéric Geerts 2003		"Love..." doesn't come easy. Writer/director Yann Samuell's attempts to be edgy, whimsical and endearing are at cross purposes in "Love Me If You Dare," a surreal romance-with-comic-moments that seems to choke on its repressed anger. The film dares you to care about its "lovers" Julien and Sophie, a boy and girl who meet as young schoolmates and become a sort of couple in their teens, only to spend the bulk of their time scheming against one another in an endless, pointless, debilitating, ever-escalating game of "Gotcha!" Samuell's cinematic vision is glorious, lavish and imaginative, in the mode of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amélie" and "City of Lost Children." In fact, there are echoes of the colorful, magical "Amélie" in "Love Me If You Dare," although it lacks the former film's sweetness. It's very difficult to get past the darkness and perversity of the relationship between Julien and Sophie. If Samuell was trying to key in on the obsessive, destructive nature of love, he succeeded. Thibault Verhaeghe and Joséphine Lebas-Joly play Julien and Sophie at 8, and they manage to be adorably annoying. Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard are believable as the grown-up pair. By the end of their story, it's so hard to sympathize with them that you may have to revel in the visuals to ignore a bitter taste in your gut from the whole affair.


	Sunday, November 17, 2024





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