As Tolstoy famously wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps the same principle could be applied to happy and unhappy couples. In any case, Emmanuel Mouret’s new film, Trois Amies (Three Friends) manages to convincingly distinguish three love affairs from each other.
None of the three couples could be said to be exactly happy, however. The three friends of the title – Joan (India Hair), Rebecca (Sara Forestier) and Alice (Camille Cottin, who won all of our hearts in the television series Call My Agent!) are all in rather complicated relationships. Joan has a daughter with Victor (played by the always touching Vincent Macaigne), who loves her madly and is always telling her so. The trouble is that she has fallen out of love with him and just can’t fake it anymore. She confides in Alice, who tells her that it’s no problem; she herself has a similar relationship with her partner Éric (Grégoire Ludig). He’s always telling her how much she cares about her and she replies in kind but doesn’t really feel it. The truth is that she just isn’t comfortable in love relationships and would rather keep things the way they are with Éric
She has no idea, however, that the third friend, the coquettish Rebecca, is having a torrid affair with Éric, who swears he’s going to tell his lover the truth very soon.
These tangled affairs lead first to tragedy, leaving Joan nearly destroyed with guilt. She eventually starts to rebuild her life thanks to a new teacher at the school where she works, who moves into her apartment building with his daughter. Things don’t go as one might expect, however, and new complications arise.
Meanwhile, Alice begins to let romance peep into her life when she dreams the phone number of an unknown man (the film’s only silly conceit, but a forgivably charming one). Encouraged by Rebecca, she calls the number and discovers that it belongs to a well-known artist. Intrigued, he asks to meet her and a flirtation develops between them.
When Rebecca tells Éric that Alice has met someone new and will probably be moving on, instead of leaving her for Rebecca, he takes a new interest in his companion. His declarations of love and affection for Alice take on a new reality. Alice, when she sees that the artist is becoming more attached to her, pulls away from him and begins to really fall for Éric.
And so it goes. The beauty of this film is that the convoluted story unfolds more or less organically, carried along by the highly talented actors – the characters are so believable that we are entirely drawn into the drama. Mouret and his fellow screenwriter Carmen Leroi have created rare cliché-free love stories for this feel-good film that doesn’t make you feel cheap for enjoying it.
Trois Amies takes place, by the way, in the beautiful city of Lyon, which is shown off to great advantage, with its two rivers, beautiful light and handsome architecture.
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