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He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not   ...   movie reviews
tue 2005-nov-08 01:37:41 pst   ...   permalink


Sunday night we watched He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not (French title: A la folie... pas du tout). It was good, though it suffered a bit from the "plot summary reveals too much" problem -- I think I would have liked it better if I'd known less going in.

<spoiler detail="medium">

So I guess I'd read something (maybe the back of the DVD case back when I used to go to the video store) which revealed that the story is told first from her perspective and then from his, as the film goes from romance to thriller... So during the first half I knew not to trust her view of events, and so on.

One interesting thing about it is that the way they do it, there's nothing in the first half that's actually lying to the audience -- it simply misleads us through clever editing. So it's sort of an example of the "unreliable narrator" literary device, but in a somewhat different way. Perhaps the more literal unreliable narrator works better in text than film; and in film it works better to accomplish it through careful inclusion and omission? I dunno.

</spoiler>

In any case, as usual, Audrey Tautou gives a good performance, and she's reason enough to see it.


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reader comments on this entry:


sat 2006-may-27 14:11:42 pdt
posted by
gotcha

i knew nothing about this movie short of the fact that tautou starred in it. definitely a fabulous movie! i also had the good fortune to view "silence of the lambs" under the same conditions (well, except it was jodie foster) and the same results.

nice to see the derfblog back in action!


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