Guy Lodge Film Critic “Any couple in love should remember that love might not last,” says someone midway through “Three Friends,” shrugging off a rebuffed kiss with impressively unruffled Gallic poise.
If everyone were so sanguine about such matters, most varieties of love story wouldn’t have reason to exist. Certainly a film like Emmanuel Mouret‘s chablis-dry romantic comedy, in which consenting adults fret and fritter over semi-consenting adultery, would be far more of a novelty than it is.
Drolly unpicking the sexual and emotional entanglements of three Lyon gal pals hovering around 40 — two married, one single, none fulfilled — Mouret’s film won’t strike anyone as fresh, either within his directorial oeuvre or that whole cinematic subgenre dedicated to French philandering, but it’s easy, breezy, pleasingly grownup viewing.
Mouret has been turning out variations on this formula since his debut “Laissons Lucie faire!” in 2000, once dipping into heritage cinema with the 2018 period piece “Lady J,” but otherwise sticking to a trusty template for chatty contemporary relationship studies that tend to draw the cream of French acting talent.
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