A restless woman discovers herself in a seductive French romance that throws out the usual dusty script about women, desire and pleasure.
What makes Anaïs run — and run? That’s the question slyly teased in “Anaïs in Love,” a French romance about a woman’s winding voyage toward self-discovery. Much like Anaïs herself, the contours of that journey at first seem transparently obvious: She’s young, self-absorbed, exceedingly restless, and she just needs to get her act together. Yet while all this frenetic motion can seem mildly charming (just like her), it can also be exasperating (also like her), which makes Anaïs and this movie more intriguing than they initially appear.
The first time you see the fast-moving Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier in a mercurial, full-bodied performance), she’s a colorful blur sprinting toward her Paris apartment, the camera and soundtrack racing with her. A grad student, Anaïs is behind in the rent and rushing to meet her landlord. She has an explanation, of course, and, as her bewildered landlord encourages her to pay up, Anaïs scurries about the flat, detailing her problems, changing her clothes and installing a fire alarm, a portend of conflagrations to come. Words fly as does Anaïs, who within minutes has dashed out, having tested the patience of landlord and viewer alike.
The writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, making her feature debut, handles the opener with economy, confidence, light comedy and a feel for choreographed chaos. Even so, as Anaïs continued to sprint and scurry, I crankily scribbled in my notes that the filmmaker was testing our patience with this chick. I was right, though not exactly. What took a while to grasp is that it isn’t necessary to like Anaïs. What’s crucial is that you stick with her, that you listen to what she says and doesn’t say, that you look beneath the skittishness to get a handle on what drives this woman — that you see her for who she is.
“Anaïs in Love” seems straightforward. It looks clear and bright, and moves as briskly as its protagonist, with the editing and lively music doing more conspicuous work than the discreet cinematography. Bourgeois-Tacquet is working within an early 21st-century realist Euro-art-film idiom, and the world she creates is familiar, precise and attractive. There isn’t a point or plot, or so it seems, just loosely strung together scenes in which Anaïs zips here and there, visiting people and places. As she does, Anaïs emerges piecemeal in conversations and in her good and bad choices, a fragmentation that encourages you to fit the whirring parts together.
It takes a while to get a read on what makes Anaïs so restive, which stirs up questions. Bourgeois-Tacquet doesn’t hurry the answers but instead fills the movie with moments of everyday life that, by turns, sync with and slow her heroine’s pace. Early on, Anaïs goes to a party (she’s late, natch), where she meets a frumpy older guy, Daniel (Denis Podalydès), a married publisher. They fall into bed, and while it doesn’t make emotional or erotic sense, Anaïs takes her role as the secret lover seriously, as if she were following an instructional manual on how to be a Frenchwoman. It’s a somewhat comic, drearily ordinary affair until it isn’t.
The atmosphere shifts ever so gently when Anaïs sees an enigmatic photograph of Daniel’s wife, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a celebrated author. Anaïs is intrigued, and then she’s beguiled, particularly after she introduces herself to Emilie during a chance encounter. Emilie is beautiful, assured and successful (it helps that she’s played by the intense, fantastically magnetic Bruni-Tedeschi). When Anaïs gazes at her, it’s easy to conclude that the writer represents an ideal, the kind of woman she wants to become. Or, rather, that’s what I thought was going on, having ignored the title and been duped by some nifty misdirection.
Reader, Anaïs falls for Emilie, and it is delightful. What happens next is surprising and touching, and upends your notions about Anaïs and what this love story — with its flighty gamine, its extramarital affair, its routine heterosexual coupling — should be and what it is. By the time Anaïs and Emilie are walking on a beach gazing at each other, the movie has revealed itself and perhaps tweaked your assumptions, including about women. Anaïs isn’t as cute, sweet or nice as women are supposed to be. She isn’t especially likable, at least by the banal standards of mainstream cinema, which is very much on point.
But while a likable woman is fine in life (or so I’ve heard), in fiction she can get dull awfully fast. Anaïs isn’t boring; she’s lovely. And while beauty is her most obvious attribute, she has a sharp mind, an impertinent tongue and, crucially, the unsettled, inchoate yearning that draws the eye, stokes the imagination and has long fueled heroic quests. She is, in other words, a 21st-century human being who, in finding herself on her own stubborn, singular, unquiet terms, has ditched the usual script about men, women, pleasure and desire. And while to watch Anaïs is to be sometimes annoyed by her, yes, to truly know her is to love her.
Anaïs in Love
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
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