Mark Reviews Movies: I LOVE AMERICA

I Love America, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 28, 2022

A French movie director is determined to change her life, by moving to the United States, in I Love America. The complications of modern-day dating and the wounds of the past, though, have far more impact on one's life than where a person happens to be living.

Those two ideas are connected in some way, since the relationships of the past are going to influence those of the present—for better and, for a decent number of people, for worse. What Lisa (Sophie Marceau) wants from a romantic relationship and how she interacts with the prospects for that kind of bond are going to be affected by her past experience with love, and as with everyone, her first experience with that comes from her parents. She has mother who's a famous singer and who left a young Lisa in a boarding school while she was on tour. She has a father who never expected to raise his child but who, in his defense, did try—even if trying meant taking his pre-teen daughter to the night club he owned.

It's little wonder, perhaps, that Lisa, at the age of 50, still has little idea of what she wants from love. Part of writer/director Lisa Azeulos' semi-autobiographical movie sees that idea as the foundation of a joke, while another part of it wants to approach the notion with an introspective sense of sincerity and severity. Despite a solid central performance, the movie never quite finds a way to marry those modes and tones in a satisfying way.

After a life in France and having raised two daughters to adulthood, Lisa decides to move to Los Angeles to write a screenplay about her life, spend a lot of time with her best friend Luka (Djanis Bouzyani), and maybe find a fulfilling romance. Her initial plans are interrupted when her ailing mother takes a turn for the worse back in Paris. Despite their fraught relationship, the daughter returns home to be with the mother one last time.

Shortly after, Lisa is back in L.A., has found a place to live and write, and is finally prepared to make a new start of her life. Luka suggests she joins an online dating app, if only break the three-year absence—as long as her mother was ill—of sex in her life. Hesitant but open to the idea, Lisa finds a lot of discomfort and at least one bit of promise in this new world of finding a partner for love and/or sex.

For a while, that's the main concern of this story, which sees Lisa fantasizing about or lamenting the hundreds of men who want to spend some time with her, having one disastrous date involving a food allergy and a bare butt, and rather happily meeting a younger man who finds her devastatingly beautiful and seductively intelligent. He's John (Colin Woodell), and for all of the awareness of how self-aware and self-congratulatory Azuelos' screenplay is in the very nature of his existence, there is some appeal and consideration in how this quick romance develops into a real connection about matters of love, honesty, and family.

It's enough, at least, that we can forgive Azeulos abandoning the premise of Lisa going on a dating spree (Luka and his romance woes take over in that regard, and that focus feels as if it comes from an early draft of an entirely different approach to this story). That only returns much later, for one scene involving her awkward rendezvous with a nudist, who gets her to become emotionally naked, too.

The vulnerability is the other end of this story, which is made up of flashbacks to Lisa's childhood—moving between home and boarding school, as well as between the homes of her temperamental mother (played by Sophie Verbeeck) and her somewhat-irresponsible but well-meaning father (played by Syrus Shahidi). In the present day, Lisa begins the growing realization that, at least in her final years, her mother might have come to appreciate her daughter, as well as regret the relationship they had for so many decades.

Beyond the obvious conceits here (The narrative is structured as the screenplay Lisa is writing—plus, you know, the shared first name of the protagonist and the filmmaker), Azeulos makes the autobiographical nature of the story apparent in the end, dedicating the movie to her own mother, the French singer Marie Laforêt. That real-life connection helps to explain why so much of the more intimate material feels equally honest—the combination of longing and resentment Lisa has for her mother—and unfocused—the vaguely philosophical narration, the meshing of tones, the melding of multiple half-formed ideas and indistinct characters.

Marceau's performance, which gets at the core of these contradictions within Lisa and her attitude toward love, goes a long way to holding these conceits together. It's inescapable, though, how much of this story feels cobbled together from one amusing premise and a collection of musings about grief, old scars, and family. In other words, I Love America feels as if it's a mash-up of two, very different stories. While each one has its charms or its self-reflective sense of dealing with grief, the combination does not make for a cohesive or generally convincing movie, no matter how convincing some of the specifics might be.

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