Wow. I read all the reviews, and the only conclusion I can come to is that all the other reviewers are gay. I'm not. I actually had to close my eyes during a certain scene. I really have no interest in seeing this sort of thing. This was a boring movie about uninteresting people. I'll go further: not just uninteresting, they inspired a sort of low-level loathing, although the main character eventually earned a high-level loathing. There was no cuteness, no clever dialog, no tension, no interesting characters. Songs? Why? They were just out of place. Blah. Now it COULD have been a much better movie--perhaps exploring different ways relatives and friends reacted to her death, or the relationship between Alice and the male character. Alice was just ignored after the tragedy. Does that make sense? Poor Ludivine, she must have needed the money to take this role.

*contains minor spoilers after dotted lineI was really reluctant to see another Honoré-Garrel pairing, as the last one I saw (Ma Mère) was seriously awful, to add to it, Les Chansons d'Amour is a musical. Not being a fan of musicals AT ALL, Honoré flawlessly intertwined the singing, the acting, and the plot so well that without the singing, the movie would be totally incomplete (unlike other musicals where it's the obvious song & dance numbers that take away from the film). Another feat of this film, is the new representation of romantic love, between men, something we rarely see in film (if not stereotypical portrayals of gay men). After this film, you leave not seeing it as another "brokeback mountain type gay man's film" but as love between people, regardless of gender. Not uncommon of Honoré or Garrel's work, Les Chansons d'Amour is wrapped around a somewhat "taboo" plot of threesomes and young homosexual love. The overall acting was great, especially Louis Garrel. Garrel plays Ismaël so amazingly charming that you quickly fall in love with him. You begin to feel his pain, to the point where you completely understand why he does everything he does in the film. Not to be out done, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, played Erwann so seductively that you almost forget how weirdly obsessive his character is. At times, I found myself teetering back and forth between rooting for Erwann to win his love and for him to fail miserably. The only reason why I gave this film a 9/10 is for minor reasons and annoyance with some of the side-plots of the film. With that said, Les Chansons d'Amour has flown under the radars for too long (completely overshadowed by Brokeback Mountain, not nearly as good as Les Chansons d'Amour) and it would be a bad move to miss out on this fine specimen of cinematic storytelling.----------------------------------------------------------- The dynamic between Ismaël and Erwann is so complicated and unorthodoxly beautiful,that at the end of the film you leave completely unsure if Ismaël really loves Erwann, but you don't really care because you know that for the present moment they need each other, maybe not forever but for the "now".

In my part of the USA, it is rare to come across a film like this. It makes no attempt to compromise its Parisian point of view for American audiences. This film allows an American audience the chance to get a glimpse from the perspective of the contemporary French young adult. There are plenty of French geographic and political reference to confuse, but they, like the Parisian scenes, just give the film its identity.Others have provided detailed synopses of the story. I would rather you just take it as it comes and enjoy how different the plot development is. As a matter of fact, watch this film and try to appreciate how different it is from the ordinary American fare…no simple boy meets girl romance here. These beautiful people aren't young, chic urbanites wearing designer clothes they can't afford, living in apartments featured in Architectural Digest. We have three young women (Ludivine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme, and Chiara Mastroianni) who lack the assistance of a personal shopper or a Beverly Hills stylist, but do not lack beauty or sensuality. Also, as a 59 year old man, I have to mention Brigitte Roüan, who shows how attractive a French grandmother can be. The men are similarly attractive. Louis Garrel demonstrates why he is currently the hottest actor in France. Newcomer Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet is disarmingly charming.But this is a musical. You will find no potential American Idols here. The actors are not going to dazzle you with vocal gymnastics. The numbers have no clever arrangements or over produced orchestration. You have evocative lyrics set to a score reminiscent of US folk music in the 1960s or more exactly, French coffee houses. One word of caution, the English subtitles are quite misleading at times. My college French is a little rusty, but a review of the French subtitles gave me an appreciation of how descriptive the lyrics are.Finally, there is no gratuitous violence or nudity, but look for the number Ma Memoire Sale (My Soiled Memory), where Ismael begs to be cleansed of the painful memory of his lost love. Some may be shocked at the scene, but you can't deny the passion and pain that permeates the number.I have downloaded the soundtrack and ordered the DVD for this is like a good French dish, an experience to linger over.

Forget Jacques Demy if you can—though one of 'Love Songs'' cast members is Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of the Catherine Deneuve of Demy's classic 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.' Honoré's 'Inside Paris'/'Dans Paris' had one song written by Alex Beaupain, a duet between Romain Duris and Joana Preiss, sung over the phone, Duris' delivery full of reedy sweetness. This time the director has fulfilled a long-cherished ambition and made a full-fledged contemporary musical, with all the songs penned by Beaupain. It's set in the relatively gritty Bastille section of Paris, and it's about a ménage à trois involving two girls and a boy: Ismael (Louis Garrel), Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), and Alice (Clotilde Hesme, Garrel's girlfriend in his father's 'Regular Lovers'), whose life together leads to sorrow, separation, and resolution. Beaupain and Honoré have collaborated for 'the film on 14 songs. 'Les chansons d'amour' is also the director's third collaboration with Louis Garrel, though he didn't plan it that way originally and Garrel had to convince him he could do a singing role.This quick follow-up to 'Dans Paris,' which like it, but musically, portrays love problems, family loyalties, and depression with an intermittently light New Wave-ish touch, is divided into three sections: Departure, Absence, and Return. Julie seems to accept Alice in the trio to please Ismael, but she wants him to herself and regrets his refusal to have a child. Perhaps she's imploding, because she drops dead in front of a boite, like River Phoenix in front of the Viper Club, but of natural causes.Alice considers it only right to move out; she can't take the place of two women, and her bisexuality no longer protects her from the full onslaught of Ismael's (and Garrel's) impetuous charms. Ismael, whom Julie's family adored, moves quickly, if shakily, forward, but Julie's stagnant older sister Jeanne (Mastroiaani), who suffers from survivor guilt, keeps turning up (a little tiresomely) at the trio's apartment. Alice had recently connected with another guy, a Breton musician Gwendal (Yannick Renier, brother of Jérémie). She doesn't seem to need Gwendal any more either, but Gwendal's gay brother Erwann (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet of Téchiné's 'Strayed') conceives a passion for Ismael and begins stalking him. (Note calling Erwann a "college student" could mislead American readers because 'collège' generally means middle school, and he's very young.) When Erwann keeps turning up, Alice, who works at the same office as Ismael, thinks this is an indirect effort on Gwendal's part to get back together. Ismael realizes what Erwann's up to, though, and at first laughs it off and tells him to get lost.But Ismael's lost himself—he's half-Jewish and seems to represent the wandering, rootless type; we never see his family or hear of his origin in any detail—and though he may have the gift of good cheer, he doesn't know where he's going, even sexually. As the film ends, he's actually settling into what's become both a romantic and a sexual affair with the determined Erwann--one of those young gay boys who knows early on exactly who he is and what he wants--and begs him, in the film's final line, "Love me less, but love me a long time." Honoré's collaboration on the screenplay with auteur Gael Morel may explain this highly gay-friendly resolution, which will no doubt startle, if not offend, some members of the original Demy generation. But a ménage à trois that's not bi- or gay-friendly wouldn't make much sense—not in this century, which Honoré, whatever his virtues and faults, firmly inhabits.American viewers aren't as likely to appreciate the many rhymes between French film families and traditions appreciatively noted by Jean-Baptiste Morain in Les Inrockuptibles last June when this film debuted in Paris. What they may grasp and enjoy is the buoyancy and speed of Honoré's film-making, which makes a virtue of low-budget necessity. Harder to tune in to at times is the director's cheerful way with sadness and depression, to be found here as it was in 'Dans Paris.' Some of the songs may feel like wallowing in sorrow, but they're better seen as singing the way out of it. Honoré lets the song come to you straight, without video-ready production numbers or irony, and the actors all do their own natural singing, only occasionally with a little trouble in the lip-syncing of their pre-recorded voices. The trouble is Honoré doesn't seem to play very well stateside, and if 'Inside Paris' got a mediocre reception, the offbeat musical element may make his 'Love Songs' even less accessible to Americans—though the romance between Garrel and Leprince-Ringuet should go down well with gay viewers, and anyone might respond to the warm depiction of a first love. It's not that the songs are hard to take; it's their typically French lightness that may make them hard to grasp in this country, where people are used to being hit over the head. Likewise Louis Garrel's playfulness, to which this director has given increasingly free rein, can be enormously appealing if you're up for it, but seems to rub some audiences, especially Anglo ones, the wrong way. Nonetheless as time goes on this film clearly has passionate devotees all over. Mark Olsen's remark in 'Film Comment' rings true: "Christophe Honoré's films aren't just films you like--you develop weird little crushes on them." The songs in the film have a rich life on YouTube and there you can see the actors and composer performing them at the Divan du Monde in Paris at a CD launching. The audience understandably walked out singing some of the lines. They grow on you.'Love Songs'/'Chansons d'amour' is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series 2008 at Lincoln Center Feb. 29-March 9, 2008. US distributor IFC Films, US limited release from March 19, 2008.