The ultralite French comedy Shall We Kiss brings to mind a conversation I had with friends recently about the Canadian romcom Young People F------, which they dismissed as "Young People Talking."
Clearly they'd not seen a lot of French movies. The innocuously pleasant Shall We Kiss (Un baiser s'il vous plait) -- which has been backhandedly compared with the works of Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer -- is of a Gallic strain of cinema where long-windedness is the soul of wit and talk is foreplay.
A story-within-a-story, it is enamoured with its own clever construction to the detriment of character development and organic humour. So okay, maybe the Woody-at-his-worst comparison holds water.
The story begins in the French city of Nantes, where Gabriel (Michael Cohen) comes across Emilie (Julie Gayet) an attractive seller of fabrics who's in town on a business trip and has found herself in a part of town that cabs avoid as if it were redolent of bad wine. Good Samaritan Gabriel drives Emilie to her hotel, the shy furtive glances as they almost say goodbye ultimately morphing into a dinner date.
The dinner goes on for hours, and as the next goodbye approaches, Gabriel goes for a kiss and is rebuffed. They exchange truths. She is married and he lives with someone. But that being the case, he maintains the kiss will be a one-off, they will never see each other again, and besides, hours later, they still don't know each other's names. "Mais, non," answers Emilie, who proceeds to tell a story to explain why (over the course of several more hours).
Cue the tale of Judith and Nicolas (Virginie Ledoyen and the film's director Emmanuel Mouret), lifelong platonic best friends, whose relationship turns on a kiss. Mouret, essaying a hangdog, schlemiel character that seems painfully Allen-ish in its neurotic desperation, bemoans his latest romantic setback, and stammeringly confesses to Judith his suspicion that only a harmless dalliance with his best girl "friend" can set his psyche right.
With trepidation, Judith agrees, setting the stage for the movie's most legitimately comic moment, a fumbling, awkward prelude to sex between friends (apparently "friends with benefits" is strictly a North American social contrivance -- who'd have thought we'd ever become less sexually uptight than the French?). Alas, like his characters' stories, Mouret's physical comedy goes on far too long and languidly -- giving the movie a kind of zany torpor.
The upshot, Judith and Nicolas fall in love (but only after spending pages of dialogue debating whether they're in love), leaving Judith's husband Claudio (Stefano Accorsi) and Nicolas' bimbo-ish girlfriend Caline (Frederique Bel) out of luck.
What follows is a "comic" last act that is too slow to be antic and too contrived to be involving.
As for Emilie and Gabriel, their stories do dovetail with our other lovers', but we'll leave the details alone.
In the end, Shall We Kiss is very little, held together with a lot of insouciance. Having two stories built around the title question is a good way to stretch a slight premise, but the result is simply two slight premises.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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