Love Me Don't
Paramount Classics' French-made Love Me If You Dare is one of those pretentious foreign movies that are improved by charismatic performances. Like most modern pictures that stress humanity's flaws, Love Me If You Dare is a contradiction, instilling just enough appeal to make its would-be lovers likable before shutting them down.
The young couple (played as adults by Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard) are interesting to watch. As children, they bond in friendship through adversity; his development is arrested by his mother's death and hers is marred by poverty and being Polish in provincial France. They seek security by playing a game of dare.
The game, which allows boy and girl to play out their mental disturbances, becomes their means of dealing with reality. Though they fall in love with one another at college, she dares him to have sex with the campus slut, he does. Then he dares her to emasculate her athletic boyfriend, which she does with his help. It's as tedious as it sounds, yet somehow the troubled youths display some measure of enthusiasm that suggests they might overcome their deficiencies.
Not in this movie, that poses the familiar refrain that true love is unattainable. Love Me If You Dare writer and director Yann Samuell uses romance to sell his anti-romantic ideals and the result is a mildly engaging story about two people who don't amount to much. Mr. Samuell's lovers—whose dares plunder to the lowest depravity—never really practice the courage of their dark convictions; they work, they marry, they bear children. They are too decent to be decadent and vice versa.
When the final dare is unveiled, there is neither tragedy nor triumph. There is only the sense of being cheated into believing that the doomed couple might exercise free will and the relief that those they leave in their wake are liberated at last.
Mr. Samuell, an illustrator, graphic artist and comic strip designer, apparently lacks the requisite despair for making a train wreck in slow motion; it's as though he is groping for an excuse to paint romance in bright colors. Love Me If You Dare is too possessed with life to fully capture people who want so desperately to stop living.
The young couple (played as adults by Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard) are interesting to watch. As children, they bond in friendship through adversity; his development is arrested by his mother's death and hers is marred by poverty and being Polish in provincial France. They seek security by playing a game of dare.
The game, which allows boy and girl to play out their mental disturbances, becomes their means of dealing with reality. Though they fall in love with one another at college, she dares him to have sex with the campus slut, he does. Then he dares her to emasculate her athletic boyfriend, which she does with his help. It's as tedious as it sounds, yet somehow the troubled youths display some measure of enthusiasm that suggests they might overcome their deficiencies.
Not in this movie, that poses the familiar refrain that true love is unattainable. Love Me If You Dare writer and director Yann Samuell uses romance to sell his anti-romantic ideals and the result is a mildly engaging story about two people who don't amount to much. Mr. Samuell's lovers—whose dares plunder to the lowest depravity—never really practice the courage of their dark convictions; they work, they marry, they bear children. They are too decent to be decadent and vice versa.
When the final dare is unveiled, there is neither tragedy nor triumph. There is only the sense of being cheated into believing that the doomed couple might exercise free will and the relief that those they leave in their wake are liberated at last.
Mr. Samuell, an illustrator, graphic artist and comic strip designer, apparently lacks the requisite despair for making a train wreck in slow motion; it's as though he is groping for an excuse to paint romance in bright colors. Love Me If You Dare is too possessed with life to fully capture people who want so desperately to stop living.
