love and friendship against aids

The French director takes us back to the 1990s with a story that questions love and time.

Living and loving with AIDS or under the threat of this disease, the subject has been explored in cinema by several important films, more or less driven by the desire to recall the carnage it caused, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. The filmmaker Gaël Morel contributes his stone to the building with a very delicate personal film which speaks above all of love. To live, to die, to be rebornwhich is released in theaters on Wednesday, September 25, 2024, asks a question: what if we had not one, but several lives?

Early 1990s, in Paris. Emma (Lou Lampros) and Sammy (Théo Christine) love each other and are about to start a family, with little Nathan as the foundation stone. Sammy also likes men, but Emma doesn’t seem to mind, it would even be “exciting” for her, she says. And when he meets their photographer neighbor Cyril (Victor Belmondo), the two quickly fall in love.

Emma and Sammy’s couple would even accommodate this relationship lived almost openly, if AIDS did not come to interfere, dynamiting the balance of the trio.

A trio? Gaël Morel explores above all with subtlety – separately – the two relationships that will never become a love triangle. “Each experience is unique”, seems to whisper in our ear the filmmaker who knows how to tell the story of marivaudage (sexual or friendly seduction) as much as this strange household, by setting his characters with a scalpel: fiery and immature Sammy, intelligent and sunny Emma, ​​confidence-inspiring Cyril.

“Serious, but not wise”, Cyril, the photographer, says. HIV-positive, the man has integrated the disease into his existence: “It gave me a requirement. I’m a better photographer since the illness”he already allows himself. The actor Victor Belmondo surpasses himself in generosity and seduction.

This is the first part of the film, short, because it cannot last. It is eminently romantic, tempered by the sober and reassuring notes of Tchaikovsky – the composer who, on the other hand, is known to have bitterly reconciled his homosexual relationships with an apparent marital life at the end of the 19th century.

In a second and much longer part of the film, the subject shifted, placing the relationship to death, but also to healing, at the heart of the questions.

How to live with the sword of Damocles of AIDS? With the deadline, with uncertainty? How to survive the disease? How to consider time? What becomes of a future project, what becomes of love, friendship, transmission?

Gaël Morel soberly sketches all these questions at once. Making the film unfold over a period of ten years, he finds the trick of bringing to life – at least in the story – a fourth character, that of the son, to relaunch the story. And prepare for the future.

The film was presented at the last Cannes Film Festival (in the prestigious Cannes Première selection), then at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival at the end of the summer. Despite a few conventional passages, undoubtedly undermined by the use of Georges Delerue’s music – beautiful, but too emphatic – this story remains linear, sometimes surprising and always breathtaking.

Gender : Drama
Director: Gael Morel
Actors: Lou Lampros, Victor Belmondo, Théo Christine
Country : France
Duration : 1h49
Exit : September 25, 2024
Distributer : ARP Selection
Synopsis : Emma loves Sammy who loves Cyril who loves her too. What could have been a romantic flirtation at the end of the last century will be blown up by the arrival of AIDS. While they were expecting the worst, the destiny of each character will take an unexpected turn.