Critics reviews

Chantal Akerman’s upbeat musical may be her least characteristic film prior to A COUCH IN NEW YORK, though it’s still extremely personal. The meticulous framing and camera movements reflect her exacting visual sensibility, and the emphasis on romantic disappointment is in keeping with such films as JE TU IL ELLE and TOUTE UNE NUIT.

It's a study in emotional surfeit within a minimalist-pop aesthetic... The film's subject is romantic love—found, lost, and desired. Marc Hérouet's score is bouncy although a bit repetitive, necessary grounding for Akerman's wildly associative lyrics, which make me simultaneously laugh and cry from first to last.

Though Akerman links erotic crises to political crises, her art is essentially choreographic; she sets her colorfully clad characters in motion as they mouth the droll, bouncy songs (for which Akerman wrote the lyrics) directly into the camera. With canny cinematic references, she evokes a post-ideological age of practical business and cultivated optimism balanced blithely between catastrophe and apocalypse.

It's as much a meditation on capitalist commodification as it is a poppy, lighthearted look at love, betrayal, gossip, and style. The ornate, romantic-triangle-infused plot has elements that recall Jacques Demy's classics The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman. But its unrelenting, acute gaze is all Akerman.