. . . of "young" Madeleine, anything does everything with anything. I wish I could be more specific, but it's obvious that Facebook--even with its 50 new gender\orientation labels announced this week--STILL lags far behind the French cinema in imagining variations of desire and longing. Between BELOVED and last year's sex epic BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, every possible sexual proclivity and\or perversion is covered at least once. BELOVED more aptly could be titled RED SHOES, as "hot" spike heels of that color star at the beginning and ending of this lengthy spelunking expedition through the cavernous Tunnel of Love, turning "young" Madeleine into a whore, and apparently leading her daughter Vera to dance (figuratively, at least) amid the falling ashes of 9-11 victims. I think it was Gertrude Stein who said, "those who can, do; those who can't, sing sad songs in French." Though lovers of plaintive Parisian ballads will award BELOVED with ratings of 8, it's only fair to point out that one-third of this flick involves people wandering actual French city streets at night, wailing out sad ditties about horribly bad sex to anyone within earshot, as a stage spotlight inexplicably follows them along!

I was very surprised at how dull and lifeless this movie is. The French movies that I have seen in the past are usually very well produced with excellent acting. When I fall asleep in the first 20 minutes of a movie,there is usually something wrong with it(the movie). It is as if the director was trying to tell a grand story about the human condition, but didn't know how to do it. Dull,lifeless and boring. This movie is not representative of the excellent French movie industry as a whole. I especially did not like the singing. There was no buildup to the singing, it was delivered in a very unemotional flat way. I walked out of the movie after 35 minutes in because of the lack of dynamics involved, the actors and actresses in the movie were simply afraid to act.

It takes a lot to get me to pay good money to see one of Cristope Honore's wet dreams and it'll take even more after this bad joke. The selling point such as it was took the shape of a chance to see Catherine Deneuve playing opposite her real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni, as they did a couple of years ago in A Christmas Tale. I really should have known better, after all Honore did little for Isabel Huppert's career when he featured her in Ma Mere albeit Huppert has a penchant, unlike Deneuve, for appearing in sleaze and is such a great actress she is able to live it down. For Deneuve it must have felt like a sentimental journey of sorts given that her breakthrough role came in The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg where one hundred per cent of the dialogue was sung. Here it's something like seventy per cent and in forty eight years the lyrics here are just as banal as Demy provided for Umbrellas but the big difference is 1) Demy had the benefit of Michele Legrand's melodic gifts and was himself a gifted director whilst Honore is lumbered with a tone-deaf composer and couldn't direct a sex-starved sailor to a hooker in Hamburg. One to forget.

The idea of this film is alright: We always try to love someone who does not respond our love. On this way we add one affair to the other without caring for the people we hurt. I personally think you could make a good film out of all the star actors and this basic idea, but this is not a good film. I cannot recommend it at all. Why? You can see here bad acting, strange characters and an overloaded story. Especially the characters do not make any sense. This wanted to be an Almodovar-film or Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but it was none of it. It wanted to dance on the verge of the tragic and humorous, but it was neither tragic nor funny. Shame! So much money, such an opportunity.