Three Friends

Joan is no longer in love with Victor and feels bad because she cannot tell him. Her closest friend Alice reassures her: she is not passionately attached to her own partner Eric either and their relationship runs perfectly well. What Alice does not know is that Eric is involved with Rebecca, a friend of them both. Joan finally leaves Victor, and Victor disappears. After that the lives of all three women shift. Emmanuel Mouret writes and directs. India Hair, Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, Damien Bonnard, Grégoire Ludig and Vincent Macaigne are in the cast. It screened in competition at the Venice film festival in 2024. Mouret's cinema is built on talk: the characters analyse their feelings constantly, explain them to each other, and the more they explain the more tangled it gets. The narrative proceeds in that manner. There is an unexpected formal decision in the middle; from a certain point the telling continues in an unusual voice, and that changes the tone of everything. The subject is not fidelity but whether people really know what they feel. The film accuses nobody and vindicates nobody. Who it is for: viewers who like French films about relationships and talkative drama in the tradition of Rohmer. Who it is not for: little happens, the dialogue is dense, and the characters analysing themselves will tire some viewers.