Guy Lodge Film Critic Love, as everyone has long agreed, makes you do crazy things. Silly things, too, and vastly indulgent things, and occasionally even beautiful ones.
Gilles Lellouche does all of these, in significant quantities, in his supersized gangster melodrama “Beating Hearts,” which takes the slender plot of innumerable B-movies of the past — as time and crime collaborate to derail the pure-hearted romance between two pretty young things — and blows it up to a dizzily grand scale, complete with widescreen camera gymnastics, daydreamy reality breaks and sporadic swirls of Old Hollywood musical choreography.
It’s a mad indulgence, but also one fully attuned to the mindset of its two besotted lead characters: When you fall completely in love for the first (and maybe last) time, doesn’t your life become its own Technicolor epic?
That air of big-swinging, love-drunk bravado will buy Lellouche’s film a lot of goodwill from audiences — particularly those at home in France, where, notwithstanding its Cannes Competition selection, it’ll play as a starry commercial enterprise rather than an arthouse item.
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