What is this feeling called love? The eternal torment of mankind: what is the meaning of this strong and sweeping feeling called love? Why is a person given the opportunity to experience it, when often the retribution is much more painful and bitter, and the most unpleasant - longer than those happy moments? How much love lives in our hearts and why does it go away? Is it worth loving when everything can collapse? And how do we avoid it, preserve it? It seems that Begbeder was able to clearly put everything in its place.
But these eternal questions puzzled the hero of the film Alexander, a sweet, handsome, romantic, but at the same time infantile and selfish young man. More precisely, he can not be called a natural egoist, he is ready to please, circle and worry, dance, laugh, but thinking first of all only about his feelings. Fate, as usual, presented a difficult choice. On the one hand, he has a permanent girlfriend Laura, with whom he is already preparing for the wedding, and on the other hand, there was a light, cocky, charming Fanfan, who turned upside down his usual established world. The world trembled and Alexander realized that slowly but surely sinking, that is, falling in love. And what to do with that feeling? There are so many questions in my head that there is no direct answer. Realizing that his wedding is a way to family routine, everyday life, to the extinction of feelings (and they are not the same as before), Alexander does not want this in relation to Fanfan. After all, this is not just a beautiful girl with whom you can twist a passionate romance and forget - this is his soul mate, and he feels incredibly good with her, he feels alive and real. But it seems to him that you can not always be happy and the fairy tale will end sooner or later. I want this music to be eternal. And Alexander began to think painfully, meeting two at the same time. .
The most touching and funny thing is that Alexander really figured out how to get out of this difficult situation, as if losing neither one nor the other. Watching him throw is both funny and sad because he is sincere in his naive, almost childish illusion and ready to go all the way. Simply put, he made a simple watershed - one for life, the other for the soul. Only the fate of such simplicity does not forgive, and the choice has to be made. But Alexander pays not for his feelings, but for the fact that his inaction and selfishness he hurt both.
There are many beautiful metaphors and symbols in the film. Dressing up in costumes of the ancient era, as the concealment of their own true feelings. Alexander, so handsome in military robes and with a sword in his hands, announces that they are just wonderful friends and almost believes it himself. Fanfan learns to be a perfumer, she feels the shades of life, its fragrances and is filled with the very ease of being and is ready to share it, but it breaks against the concrete wall of fears and complexes of Alexander. More precisely, the mirror wall, which is written about more than once, and this is one of the central symbols of the film. To see but not to touch, to hear but not to answer, to love but not to be truly near. And the price of that kind of love.
At the end of the film, I mentally applauded Fanfan, her perseverance, her patience, and the final dialogue at the mirror wall touched me to the core. A lot of movies are about relationships and feelings, but I haven’t seen as much desperation as Fanfan in her attempts to make sense of the Platonic minded. Alexandra, who thinks the world was just in accepting his truth, and that he is not the only one.
Alexander's fears are clear and eternal. A person in love always takes risks, because love is both strength and weakness at the same time. We are vulnerable to opening ourselves up to others, but the other risks the same. But when the two halves come together, they form a whole. And to find out what will happen next, you can only take a step forward, and not cowardly hiding behind their illusions, prejudices, justifying their weaknesses imperfections of this world and banal words that everything is not eternal under the moon. These are excuses and a way to nowhere. You can think about love as much as you like and worry about heart wounds, scars, but if you have done nothing to preserve that bright, real and beautiful - marry Laura, raise children and live with the idea that life, such a difficult one, is wasted. Fanfan and Alexander took a step towards each other, despite and against each other.
9 out of 10
Original