Eric Rohmer was more than one of the directors who formed the French New Wave. He also wrote a lot of surveys and articles about cinema, especially about his favorite director, F.W. Murnau, out who he wrote his dissertation. His first article that got published in the year 1948 was titled (directly translated:) "Film, art of space." In the year 1962 Eric Rohmer published his academic survey called: "The construction of space in Murnau's Faust." While reading about his surveys and articles, it's no surprise that space in Rohmer's films seems to be as important as the plot.Eric Rohmer's career started with problems, and it wasn't going forward. But when he got off the ground, he proceeded more purposefully than anyone. When the new wave era ended in 1964, the directors of it started eventually finding their own path. Eric Rohmer started his series of six film, The Moral Tales and continued with Comedies & Proverbs in the 1980's. L'ami de mon amie (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) is sixth and the last one in the series. It builds around the proverb: "My friends' friends are my friends." The comical situations emerge between two women who unintentionally swap boyfriends.Two women suddenly meet while having lunch. One of the two women is Blanche, she is a skinny, uptight young woman, who is still searching for herself. The other is Lea, she's self-confident and a very feminine person. They both have something going on with men, so the main characters have their opponents; shy Fabien and a true player, Alexandre.While trying to figure out the space of My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, I can't miss the futuristic city the characters live in. I got the feeling that Eric Rohmer isn't trying to tell a story of four specific people who live in France. To me he's telling about all the people living in these suburbs of Paris. The space of a futuristic city, the city full of postmodern architecture without any past. This theme of the milieu leads to rootlessness. The people of this city have no past, each of them like to analyze and talk about themselves. But none of them really know who they are.My Girlfriend's Boyfriend offered these kind of things for me. In addition to its intelligent narrative, it is full of hilarious comical situations. Eric Rohmer builds four very interesting characters which will take you on board."My friends' boyfriends are my boyfriends."

I love this film for many reasons for one it takes place in this weird sort of shopping mall town outside of Paris that is very post modern surreal, and they do this funny standing up boating sport that is so ludicrous. I also really love the line, which I paraphrase, "Oh Alexandre is the kind of guy anyone would fall in love with" Blanche, presumably can do better: to love someone it takes a more extraordinary person to love. There is not quite as much pompous holding forth in this film that one has to suffer through with most Rohmer films set in contemporary times. Although, as usual, most of the people involved are exquisitely hyporcritical, here it's fun, the comedy is a little more blatant. I notice from reading reviews on IMDb that a lot of people who adore Rohmer, don't, as far as I'm concerned, half understand what he's getting at. I'm sure I went on and on about this in a review of Claire's Knee. If I didn't, why didn't I? Of course Boyfriends and Girlfriends became the model for an homage by Woody Allen, one of his better movies, too, "Hubands and Wives".

Not the best film of 1987; Au revoir les enfants was better, but one certainly worth your investment of time.Writer/director Eric Rohmer is not giving us the typical French vistas of outdoor cafés and artists, but is showing the lives of materialistic and shallow French yuppies in the French suburbs outside Paris. The Eiffel Tower is only seen in the remote distance.They focus on looks alone in choosing boyfriends.Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet - Chocolat) and Lea (Sophie Renoir) are friends. Not BFF, but just two twenty-somethings that hang and discuss men.Lea has Fabien (Eric Viellard), and Blanche is enchanted with Alexandre (François-Eric Gendron).Blanche gets herself in a situation where she is involved with Lea's boyfriend, while Lea is off sampling others. Although they pretend to be friends, the constant flirting takes it's toll and they end up in bed. But she still won't commit out of fear of hurting her friend.So, what does she do when Lea announces she has broken up with Fabien for good? She realizes that Alexandre is an unattainable dream and goes off to find Fabien. Meanwhile Alexandre and Lea hit it off.The laughs are plenty as the two friends try to get their love lives together without hurting the other.Nothing deep; like watching an episode of Friends, but cute and enjoyable with Chaulet and Renoir providing excellent performances.

A young woman, Blanche (the lovely Emmanuelle Chaulet), works in the City Hall of a trendy New Town near Paris (somewhat to his discredit, Rohmer's films always occurs in middle class and upper middle class milieus, never in working class neighborhoods or in the immigrants building projects). Having recently arrived there, Blanche lives quite a lonely life, until she becomes friends with another young woman, Lea (Sophie Renoir), through which she met her boyfriend Fabien (Eric Viellard), and an acquaintance of the couple, Alexandre (François-Eric Gendron). Basically, the movie follows the time honored plot of exchange of relationships. A is with B, and C with D, but then A will start a liaison with D, which will make C jealous, and would start going with B in revenge and so forth. The title in French is a pun: the boyfriend of my friend would (could) become my boyfriend. Rohmer is known to be a political conservative, but here he is hardly a moralist, since he examines the sexual freedom of today's youth without condemning it. The movie is slow and talky, but these characters are believable and appealing (if somewhat shallow and a bit better looking than ordinary).