Long a fan of French films (Eric Rohmer is my favorite director),I rented "Love, etc." with high hopes. I have often found that even the most superficial of French films have more to say about life and relationships than the best Hollywood product.

"Love, etc." proved to be an exception. It starts off promisingly, successfully capturing the dynamics of a long-term friendship and the awkward dance common at the beginning of relationships. But it soon degenerates into a story of three superficial, unlikable characters with hard-to-fathom motivations. There is little evidence of "love" and much exploration of "etc.". The self-congratulatory "aren't-we-civilized-and-modern" final scene only serves to cap off what is, on the whole, a truly bad French film.

"Love, etc." gently goes along like a modern version of Truffaut's "Jules & Jim"... It's a rather nice movie, well directed in a clean and polished way, quite sensitive and even touching at times... The best things about it are -no doubt- Charlotte Gainsbourg's inspired performance ("as always..." one might add),Yvon Attal's touching caracter, and an absolutely brilliant music score from Alexandre Desplat... The "not-so-good" things include a rather unconvincing and over-acted performance from Charles Berling, and the general feeling that the movie never really realises how gripping and emotional it could have been if it hadn't been so... hum... polished actually. Worth seeing though... PS : ...and now available in France on VHS, for you anonymous fan of this movie !!!

Marion Vernoux is good at pain and relationships and even better at painful relationships (she worked on the screenplay of Tonie Marshall's brilliant Venus Beaute' and wrote and directed the wonderful Rien a faire which translates as nothing doing) and here, straying into Jules et Jim territory she applies scalpel and probe to expose the diseased tissue in a melancholic menage a trois. Yvan Attal, an excellent writer director himself, and Charlotte Gainsbourg have long been an offscreen couple and often act together so it's not unusual that they make it look easy. The fatal flaw in all this is Charles Berling, a fine actor as he's demonstrated time and again but woefully lacking in the charm and charisma which we are constantly informed is Pierre's stock in trade - where other unprepossessing men sometimes laugh women into bed we can only assume that Pierre has bored his string of girl friends into bed. Apart from Jules et Jim we're also in the Forbidden Fruit ballpark here; Hitherto it's Pierre who inhabited the Fast Lane love/sex-wise while Benoit couldn't get arrested but when Benoit, against all the odds, meets and marries Marie, Pierre cannot and will not rest until he has seduced her away from his best friend and as someone once said, with friends like that ...

Vernoux contrives to inject a delicate Chekhovian melancholy into even the happier scenes and for those who insist on reading deeper meanings into even Police Academy it could be argued that Benoit is a Vanya who actually wins his great love only to lose her and wind up attempting to balance the books of his emotional life without even a niece to assist him and share his misery. If Rien a fair remains Vernoux's finest film (to date) by a mile Love, etc is an honourable second.