Mark Reviews Movies: ANAÏS IN LOVE

Anaïs in Love, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 28, 2022

In many ways, Anaïs, played by an ebullient and luminous Anaïs Demoustier, is a quintessential protagonist for a romantic comedy. In an equal number of ways, writer/director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet's Anaïs in Love is a sort of archetypical romantic comedy. Our main character encounters complication after complication in her search for true love, and as those complications pile atop each other, she's left with a series of choices, potentially uncomfortable situations, and a lot of entangled relationships that could mean disaster.

A key distinction in Bourgeois-Tacquet's story is the foundation of her protagonist. She's a woman in her 30s, who could be seen as ditzy or flighty, given her penchant for being late to everything and her apparent inability to hold down any kind of responsibility.

Some might say Anaïs should know better, considering her age and the general insecurity of every part of her life. There is also, though, a case to be made that, despite all of the uncertainty in and surrounding her life, Anaïs knows well enough what she wants and needs. More importantly, she knows what she doesn't want and doesn't need, too. A lot of times, the search for the former set—what one actually desires and requires in life—begins with and takes a long journey through the latter—what one doesn't.

Anaïs is still looking, and despite the fact that she doesn't know what to do with a fire alarm, she's smart enough to know that there's more out there for her. Finding out what that more is, though, turns out to be the hardest part.

We meet Anaïs running through the streets of Paris, carrying a bouquet of flowers and late, as she always is in general, for a meeting with her landlady (played by Marie-Armelle Deguy). Besides not having a fire alarm in the apartment (which falls to ground minutes after Anaïs sticks it to the wall, although that's not the worst damage she causes on the device), the tenant is two months behind on her rent.

Anaïs' response is a breathless speech: She was supposed to live in the apartment with her boyfriend Raoul (Christophe Montenez), and while she quickly learned that co-habitation—or maybe it was just him—wasn't for her, now she's not entirely sure if the two are still a couple or if she cares either way about that. It's a justification that means everything to her but nothing to the woman who wants the rent. There's a real skill to the way Demoustier plays the scene with such sincerity that the rambling never feels like an excuse. It's so naïvely honest and delivered with such off-handed confidence that the landlady seems either convinced or so taken aback that there's no way for her to respond.

The rest of the story has her going through in a similar way. Of the loves or "loves" of the title, the first two are Raoul, who's equally irritated by and smitten with Anaïs' attitude toward and philosophy of life, and Daniel (Denis Podalydès), an older man and publisher who meets Anaïs at a party for mutual friends (For distinction, she's friends with a couple about to be married, while he's friends with the bride-to-be's parents). Raoul is out of the picture almost as soon as we first meet him, and as for Daniel, he's a divorcee, currently in a long-term and live-in relationship with another woman.

He's convinced that Anaïs is the next love of his life and also that he doesn't want his current life to change. If anyone wants to criticize Anaïs for her uncertainty, surely Daniel should be judged more harshly by those same standards. At least Anaïs knows that her behavior can be unclear about how she feels about others or downright dismissive of them.

That's not entirely true of her, too. There's the fact of her mother (played by Anne Canovas), whom Anaïs adores and wants to admire her. Upon a visit back home, she learns that her mother has had a recurrence of cancer, and while Anaïs' mother and father (played by Bruno Todeschini) put on an air of optimism, the truth of the diagnosis is less so.

Then, there's the real love that appears in Anaïs' life. She is Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a professional writer who, by the way, just happens to be Daniel's current girlfriend. She reads some of the author's work, finds it captivating and quite similar to way she thinks about matters. For all of her quirks and apparent aloofness, Anaïs is, after all, quite intelligent—well-read and working, if slowly, on a thesis about the portrayal of passion by writers of the 17th century. Even before she meets Emilie, Anaïs is attracted to her, and that feeling only grows when she does meet the writer and abandons a job to spend a week with her at a writers retreat.

The resulting story is a clever balance between comedy, since Anaïs has to hide her pre-existing connection to Emilie (especially when Daniel arrives at the retreat unannounced), and the thoughtful development of a real bond between the two women. In a way, the process is also an act on the part of Bourgeois-Tacquet, who cuts through the convoluted setup and potential melodrama of this premise, in order to get at the heart of her protagonist and the kind of genuine connection that could transform Anaïs' view of life and love.

The comedy is fine enough in Anaïs in Love, but it's not really the point. It's almost an excuse to dig deeper into the eponymous character as she finds what she really wants—and the person who embodies that the most.

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