Emmanuel Mouret, the filmmaker of love

The French have always known how to capitalize on the feeling of love like no one else. Hence, it may sound daring to define Emmanuel Mouret (Marseille, 1970) as the filmmaker of love . But he is. Since his beginnings in the 1990s, he has explored the subject of love in a body of work that now exceeds a dozen feature films, albeit always from a comic and luminous perspective, while remaining reflective and even philosophical. He rose to prominence in our country with the ensemble comedy The Art of Love (2011), which was his seventh feature film. With his next film, Caprice (2015), he said goodbye to the period in which he had been the hero of his own misadventures, a mix of Woody Allen and Jacques Brel, to grow as a filmmaker, always accompanied by his director of photography Laurent Desmet, with the masterful The Things We Say, the Things We Do (2020) and Chronicle of a Fleeting Love (2022), two films that, due to the discursive nature of the dialogues, not at all naturalistic, and the exquisite education of their characters, could be seen, in light of his previous adaptation of Diderot, Mademoiselle de Joncquières (2018) –released on Netflix as Lady J (sic)–, as period films that would take place in the present day, without ostentatious dresses, but with the intellectual demands and flirtatious arrogance of the Age of Enlightenment.

Because of the unconditional love he bestows on his characters and the freshness of his perspective, his films might also be reminiscent of those of Guillaume Brac, another filmmaker who is not sufficiently known or acclaimed on this side of the Pyrenees. Brac, however, is a director of the wonderful All aboard! (2020) who focuses on a popular, far from bourgeois cinema, while Mouret's characters are more inclined to hang out in museums, listen to classical music, or meet by chance in re-release cinemas.

⁄ 'Three Friends' can be seen as a philosophical comedy about guilt, a very cinematic theme

In Three Friends , which hits theaters on July 11, Vincent Macaigne is more of an absence than a presence. His character soon expires, becoming a fleeting ex-husband, a friendly ghost: “You could say that, by dying, he has completed his therapy, having solved all his problems with possessive love. He is finally capable of a purer, more relaxed, more tender love,” Mouret tells us, with his usual charm .

It all begins when India Hair (a wonderful and also hilarious actress), his wife, a timid high school teacher, begins to feel guilty because, despite the fact that her husband adores her and they have a wonderful daughter, she feels she no longer loves him as she used to, which torments her. Driven by the need to be honest, she ends up confessing, precipitating events in a direction that will make her feel even more guilty, leaving her unable to rebuild her life. "I was interested in this idea, typical of a melodrama, but at the same time it seemed too serious for my personality. So I linked it with other stories I had in mind, those of her friends."

On the one hand, there's Camille Cottin's character, who no longer believes in passion, but is determined to maintain a calm, secure, and balanced relationship. On the other, there's Sarah Forestier, who is a bit more of a disaster, both professionally and emotionally, and is having an affair with a married man, Mr. X... "These two stories allowed me to make a lighter, more musical film, without losing her personal dilemmas to contribute ideas."

⁄ “Cinema doesn’t have to provide answers, but it allows you to accompany the characters without judging them.”

Three Friends can be seen as a philosophical comedy about guilt, a theme that, as Mouret reminds us, couldn't be more cinematic: "As well as in melodrama, it's present in almost everything Hitchcock wrote, and it's also a fundamental issue in our relationships with others." For the filmmaker, not a soldier, of love, "we can go back to classical theater, and we'll find that the same question has always been there: To what do we have to be faithful, to our feelings or to our commitments? Naturally, there is no answer. We can find answers on the internet, on the radio or television, but it seems more fair and legitimate to live in doubt, to accept it, because doubt pushes us to pay more attention to the other. Cinema doesn't have to provide answers, but it allows you to accompany the characters, without judging them, at least in the films I like. In the end, the catharsis that the big screen offers us lies in the privilege of sharing the characters' doubts," continues this unstoppable lover of doubt, who would be incapable of repressing it, even if it made him feel guilty: "It's terrible to feel guilty, but the opposite is perhaps worse, because it implies not wanting to see the other, covering one's eyes. One becomes dehumanized when one doesn't feel guilty. In the end, the question is how we can do it so that we all live together, since taking an interest in the world of couples is doing it for the minimum unit of society, and what we see is that everything is very complicated there.”

Emmanuel Mouret ​Three Friends ​Released in theaters on July 11