Les Amoureux: A Tangled Mess of Pity and Old Flames

Should you watch this?

Look, if you like old-school melodramas where people stare out of windows and sigh a lot, you might get a kick out of this. It’s got that specific, slightly dusty charm that only mid-century European dramas seem to carry. If you need pacing that feels modern or characters that actually talk like human beings instead of poets, you’re probably going to hate it. It moves at the speed of a rainy afternoon.

The premise is simple enough—maybe too simple. She’s sick of the cheating husband routine and moves on. Then she sees him again, and he's totally pathetic now. It’s a classic setup that usually ends with someone crying on a train platform, but there’s something weirdly hollow about the way it unfolds here.

Wait, that coat?

There’s this one scene where Charles Boyer is wearing a coat that looks like it weighs about forty pounds. I couldn't stop looking at it. Does it help the performance? Probably not. It just made me wonder if he was sweating through the entire take. That’s the kind of thing you notice when the script starts to sag a bit in the middle.

Viviane Romance is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. She has this look in her eyes—half-exhausted, half-bored—that feels more real than anything else in the movie. You can almost feel her wondering why she walked back into this mess.

• The lighting in the cafe scene is honestly kind of beautiful.
• The dialogue is very, very formal. Almost hurts to listen to.
• That one background extra who just keeps walking back and forth behind the main characters for like three minutes.

It reminds me a bit of the suffocating domestic drama you see in The Governor's Daughters, where everyone is constantly trapped by their own bad decisions. But where that one felt sharp, this one feels like it's drifting. It’s not quite as punchy as The Knife, which knew exactly when to cut to the chase.

There’s a moment near the end where she looks at him, and it’s meant to be this huge, cathartic realization. Instead, I just felt a bit confused. Is it pity? Is it just that she’s tired of being angry? The movie doesn't really care to tell you, which I suppose is a choice. A frustrating one, but a choice nonetheless.

It’s not a masterpiece. It’s just a weirdly specific look at people being awful to each other for the sake of 'romance.' Watch it for the costumes or the stares, but don't go in expecting to walk away with any deep life lessons. Sometimes a movie is just a movie, even when it tries really, really hard to be about something more. 🎞️