Charlotte Gainsbourg loves Benoît Poelvoorde (Cohen Media Group)Marc (Benoît Poelvoorde) finds love or something like it in director Benoît Jacquot‘s new film. The problem, as the title suggests, is that he finds it twice. And they’re sisters. Also, he has a heart condition.
Marc is a tax inspector from Paris on a business trip to the country town of Valence when he misses his train. The scruffy moppet is celebrating his 47th birthday, alone. Wandering into a local bar, he meets Sylvie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who runs an antique shop with her sister and rocks out a black bra and white blouse look that marries Patti Smith with Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes (I know who I’m going as for Halloween). Marc doesn’t say it out loud, but you can tell he loves the Black Crowes and Patti Smith, and maybe Charlotte’s dad Serge, because he falls hard for Sylvie. He’s looking for a hotel to spend the night and tells this skinny rock ‘n’ roll lovechild “I love women.” Despite a complete lack of visible chemistry, pheromones do their thing and they do their thing, and before Marc returns to Paris they plan a rendezvous at the Tuileries so they can rock out again.
Sylvie, who’s unhappily married, tells her sister Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni, the spitting image of her dad) about her new Muppet lover. She hops a train to Paris for their secret rendezvous, but as Sylvie waits for Marc we see him in his office waylaid by a pair of Chinese businessmen who answer his questions with nods and laughter because they can’t speak French. Ah, so funny! “Merde! Les Chinoises!” As the time for his assignation comes and goes, his progress is further compromised when, driving out of the parking garage, he has a heart attack. Oh the heart, et cetera!
Time passes and Marc cannot stop thinking of his paramour with the black bra/white blouse look. He goes back to Valence in the hope of finding her, but instead finds Sophie crying at the tax center, worried about a potential audit on the antique shop she and her sister run. Sylvie left the country with her unhappy husband for a job in Minneapolis (where one presumes the French food is not so good) and in her wake left lightly misarranged account books. Marc (whom, you may recall, loves women) comes to the rescue and falls in love with Sophie, all before figuring out that by cinematic coincidence Sophie is the sister of Sylvie, who thinks Marc stood her up at the Tuileries.
Chiara Mastroianna loves Benoît Poelvoorde (Cohen Media Group)Got all that?
Jacquot is most recently known for the serviceable Farewell My Queen. 3 Hearts is a standard-issue melodrama about ordinary French people (and their immortal mother Catherine Denueve) tangled in a web of chance and celebrity genes. It’s not a particularly good movie, but it’s watchable enough that I wanted to find out what happened to people I wouldn’t ordinarily care about. That’s thanks in part to something that makes many contemporary movies unwatchable for me: the score. As soap opera coincidences pile on, the dramatic score by Bruno Coulais (Coraline) gently stabs you in the ear with percussive violins that build tension. I did not feel anybody’s heart beating in 3 Hearts, but those strings kept me moderately invested in a pair of sisters and the moppet tax inspector they loved. The film accomplished this through a curious alchemy of acting, editing, and music: voila le cinéma.
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3 Hearts
Directed by Benoît Jacquot
Written by Julien Boivent and Benoît Jacquot
With Benoît Poelvoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve,
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, brief nudity, thematic material, and smoking throughout Running time 106 minutes
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row
