Film review: There's a lot more to Anaïs in Love than bed-hopping amour fou

Anaïs in Love explores the limits — if limits there are — to a woman’s independence.

★★★★☆

Anaïs in Love (15A) stars Anaïs Demoustier as the eponymous heroine, a young Parisian student of literature who believes that ‘she doesn’t know how to love’. She’s giving it the old college try, though: pregnant with her boyfriend’s (Christophe Montenez) baby, Anais embarks on an affair with the much older Daniel (Denis Podalydès), only to discover that she’s far more attracted to Daniel’s girlfriend Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi).

No one does bedroom farce quite like the French, of course (and here we even get the bonus of a lemur sabotaged by Xanax), but there’s considerably more to writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s film than bed-hopping amour fou. Instead, it’s more interested in exploring the limits — if limits there are — to a woman’s independence, and charting the unusual but deeply affecting bond that develops between Anaïs and Emilie. 

Eponymous heroine Anaïs Demoustier believes that ‘she doesn’t know how to love’.

This bond is one that transcends sexual attraction to become something more profound. Indeed, their age-gap — Anaïs is young enough to be Emilie’s daughter — suggests that the characters are different iterations of the same person: the young student working on a thesis about 17th century descriptions of passion could very easily mature into a successful author grown weary with the world and dissatisfied with the way in which she has accepted second-best in love.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Anaïs Demoustier are excellent together, generating a wholly believable chemistry — physical and otherwise — with Demoustier in captivating form as a flighty, irrepressible force of nature.

(cinema release)