New French film is fleeting fun - review

The new French movie opening in theaters around Israel on November 9 is titled, in English, Diary of a Fleeting Affair (in French, it’s Chronique d’un Liaison Passagere), but I like the Hebrew title best: Roman Tzarfaty, which translates to French Romance.

That’s exactly what it is, a tale of a Parisian adulterous couple whose relationship turns into something that neither of them could have envisaged at first. As the title suggests, it all takes place in beautiful apartments filled with tasteful art, where attractive people uncork bottles of wine and wear lovely beige clothes, and on charming Parisian streets.

Directed by Emmanuel Mouret, who has made other crowd-pleasing movies – among them Les Choses Qu’on Dit, Les Choses Qu’on Fait – it’s like a French movie by Woody Allen, if he still had a sense of humor, and utterly unlike Allen’s recently released French-language movie, Coup de Chance, which was tedious and melodramatic.

Diary of a Fleeting Affair tells the story of Simon (Vincent Macaigne), a married man and compulsive over-thinker, who impulsively approaches Charlotte (Sandrine Kiberlain), a free-spirited single mom who is happy to have a no-strings-attached affair. Millions of people around the world undoubtedly have such affairs all the time, but the ones they make movies about are the ones that get complicated – and, of course, that’s what happens here.

We never see Simon’s wife or any of his or Charlotte’s children, and the affair exists in a kind of magic space carved away from both of their lives. He runs birthing classes for expectant mothers — we see him once at work— and I don’t remember what she does. But it doesn’t matter, because their lives are certainly not about their work, and no one seems to have any money problems or other issues that would distract them from the affair.

Two leads have a warm rapport

Except for one late addition to the cast and a couple of minor characters, the movie just focuses on the two of them. They go to bed together, visit museums, and go on walks in the park, but what they mostly do is talk – about their lives, their dreams, and what this relationship means to them. The dialogue is intelligent and, for the most part, not cliched. They both want fun and diversion without obligations and expectations, and they pull it off, until a twist comes along that I doubt you would see coming.

Simon has a tendency to tie himself up in knots over everything, which is what makes the bearded, unathletic guy seem like a Woody Allen character. He’s the Alvy Singer to Charlotte’s Annie, a point hammered home by the fact that at one point, they go to see Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, a movie that the Annie Hall characters were planning to see. They could also be characters out of an Eric Rohmer movie, where people talk in playful, erotic circles. Their tailored jackets and lovely apartments could have come right out of a Rohmer movie. (Rohmer’s films have recently achieved a particular milestone of the digital age: There is now an Instagram account, rohmerfits, celebrating fashion in his films.)

While the two leads don’t have much chemistry together, perhaps this is part of the director’s design. They do, however, have a warm rapport. Sandrine Kiberlain is beautiful but has a real-person quality that has made her one of the most popular actresses in France. She looks like a cross between Shelley Duvall and Charlize. I first noticed her as the dizzily clueless bourgeois wife in The Women on the 6th Floor, and she has been very good in a great many movies, including Being 17, where she plays a doctor in a rural area whose son realizes he is gay. Vincent Macaigne specializes at playing rumpled, nebbishy guys in movies and TV series such as Irma Vep and News from Planet Mars.

While there is something inconsequential about the story, since its characters are so far removed from what most of us think of as real life, there is something pleasant about joining them in their universe of romance and sex. Think of it as a 90-minute vacation from real life.