. . . of "young" Madeleine, anything does everything with anything. I wish I could be more specific, but it's obvious that Facebook--even with its 50 new gender\orientation labels announced this week--STILL lags far behind the French cinema in imagining variations of desire and longing. Between BELOVED and last year's sex epic BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, every possible sexual proclivity and\or perversion is covered at least once. BELOVED more aptly could be titled RED SHOES, as "hot" spike heels of that color star at the beginning and ending of this lengthy spelunking expedition through the cavernous Tunnel of Love, turning "young" Madeleine into a whore, and apparently leading her daughter Vera to dance (figuratively, at least) amid the falling ashes of 9-11 victims. I think it was Gertrude Stein who said, "those who can, do; those who can't, sing sad songs in French." Though lovers of plaintive Parisian ballads will award BELOVED with ratings of 8, it's only fair to point out that one-third of this flick involves people wandering actual French city streets at night, wailing out sad ditties about horribly bad sex to anyone within earshot, as a stage spotlight inexplicably follows them along!

Very rarely are movies made about unrequited (one-sided) love and love lost, let alone musicals. It's good and somewhat interesting; though it tests your patience a lot. With the terrific star-cast it has, I expected a lot more. It falls short of a definite and good plot, and it lacks heart.Catherine Deneuve is not even utilized properly. Ludivine Sagnier is charming; it's amazing how much she has grown up since Ozon's 'Swimming Pool'. And it was delightful to see Paul Schneider in this French musical. The remaining cast just does their job, which is not much.Even though it's a musical, the songs are quite average. The only song I actually loved is 'Ici Londres (Heaven Knows)', sung by Chiara Mastroianni and Paul Schneider.

Oh sweet baby Jesus. If the cinema had fixed up the seats to the electric mains and had run through 20,000 volts every 5 minutes I might just have enjoyed this film. As it was, me, my wife and the 12 other unfortunates who had not read IMDb reviews before purchasing tickets suffered the worst 2 and one quarter hours of French cinema ever printed to pass through the gate of a projector.OK - it started fine and looked as if it was going to be a nice piece of retro-Parisien farce but then...they began to sing. What the ....! And at various stages through this loooooooooong film some character or other would start wandering through the streets of Paris, Reims, London, Montreal, wherever, and start with the stupid words ("Big Ben has melted and I can't tell the time") and turgid tunes.All the characters were unpleasant to various degrees and totally and utterly unbelievable. I was desperate for all of them to die off. Good news, two of them did, bad news, the others lived to keep on wandering the streets turgidly wittering on...

The idea of this film is alright: We always try to love someone who does not respond our love. On this way we add one affair to the other without caring for the people we hurt. I personally think you could make a good film out of all the star actors and this basic idea, but this is not a good film. I cannot recommend it at all. Why? You can see here bad acting, strange characters and an overloaded story. Especially the characters do not make any sense. This wanted to be an Almodovar-film or Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but it was none of it. It wanted to dance on the verge of the tragic and humorous, but it was neither tragic nor funny. Shame! So much money, such an opportunity.