Le chant de l'amour: A strange, quiet little drift

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, it depends on if you like watching people stare out of windows or at each other for long, uninterrupted stretches. It’s definitely for the slow-cinema crowd who don't mind a lack of urgency. If you’re the type of person who needs Hit and Run levels of chaos, you’re going to be bored to tears within the first ten minutes. 📽️

It’s weirdly hypnotic, though. The cast is huge—honestly, too huge—and I struggled to keep track of who was pining for who by the midway point. Alice Tissot is doing a lot of the heavy lifting with her expressions alone.

Small things I caught

• There’s a background lamp that flickers in the third scene and it never gets fixed. It’s the most distracting thing in the whole movie.
• The way they handle transitions is basically just fading to black whenever they get tired of a conversation. It happens so often I started counting.
• The costumes are great, but sometimes it feels like they’re wearing them in a room that hasn't been dusted since the 1930s.

It’s not as punchy as The Flame of Hellgate, obviously. It feels more like a mood board than a structured story. Sometimes a character will just walk off-screen mid-sentence, and the camera lingers on an empty chair for an extra five seconds. It feels intentional, but it also feels like someone forgot to yell 'cut'.

Boris Skibine has this one look he gives where he seems like he knows exactly how weird the whole production is. Maybe he was just hungry. Who knows.

I kept thinking about how this compares to something like Flaming Youth, which has at least a bit of fire in its belly. This movie, by contrast, is like a lukewarm cup of tea left on a piano. It’s polite, it’s quiet, and it doesn't leave much of a stain.

The dialogue is very... flowery. It’s all 'the heart knows what the heart wants' type stuff. It sounds nice, I guess, but I wanted someone to just say something blunt for once. Just one real, messy human sentence. 🙄

I don't think it’s a masterpiece. I don't think it’s a disaster. It just exists, like a dusty book you find in an attic. You look at it, you flip a few pages, you put it back. And that’s fine.