Critics reviews

Director Michel Leclerc and his co-screenwriter, Baya Kasmi, never swear off whimsy, but they do enrich its broad strokes with a nuanced and substantive inquiry into racial identity... What is so surprising – even exhilarating – about The Names of Love is that it shucks off the desultory roadblocks that engine the modern romantic comedy – all that razzmatazz of missed connections and dunderheaded misunderstandings.

Forestier's performance is a tour de force of comic acting, maintaining astonishing alertness and energy from shot to shot and scene to scene. In a role that might have seemed merely scatterbrained and satiric, she creates a driven, manic character...e She's extremely funny, but also precise and real, with everything she does grounded in the odd psychology of the character.

Baya is warned to make no reference whatever to anything remotely suggesting the Holocaust, and of course her subconscious mercilessly generates such words as "oven" and "camp." This scene is funny in concept but not so funny in execution. That's sort of the whole story of "The Names of Love." We see it's a comedy, we appreciate the satire, but our laughter is easily contained.

In spite of the film’s serious subtext, it’s unmistakably a romantic comedy, and Leclerc keeps a light touch throughout... But the whimsy is balanced by the leads’ chemistry, and the deft sense of the way two people falling in love bring not just their own histories with them, but the histories of their families and the cultures and nations that molded them. That’s a lot of weight for something as intangible as love to shoulder.

For all the potentially dangerous subjects it glosses, above all the tangled legacies of the Holocaust and the Algerian war, “The Names of Love” dances away from any uncomfortable provocation. Even when sticking out its tongue, it is finally just an airy comedy riding on one cheeky, incandescent performance.

"Le Nom des Gens" (The Names of Love) is so inspired and insightful that it is frequently hilarious yet does not shy away from tragedy. Leclerc and Kasmi's ability to explore complex, volatile social issues with such exuberant humor won them a screenplay Cesar...

Nothing screams “French crossover comedy” like jokes about Auschwitz and childhood sexual abuse, the main rib-ticklers of Michel Leclerc’s blood-clot-inducing second feature.

Leclerc’s film is a hodgepodge of both modes of humor and ideas, a mix that, while not always successful, is frequently fascinating... And it’s an indication of the film’s generous ambitions that the complexities of its several pressing questions are never underplayed, even if they’re often rendered ridiculous for comedic purposes.

This delightful, sexy, and often audacious crowd-pleaser, though at times gratingly cute, should perform wonders at the boxoffice in its native France. However, The Names of Love (which has nothing to do with its French title Le Nom des Gens, which is where the problem starts) is so French, that most international audiences will be completely baffled by its very specific topical references.

The film has a serious backbone, dealing with contemporary intolerance on France, both in the political mainstream and in Islam; what-the-hell flippancy allows it to lightly carry off such taboo topics as the veil. Backstories about Algeria and the Holocaust prove harder to handle, which is where the faintest edge of sentiment creeps in.

The director’s second feature... cleverly combines contemporary history, the themes of family, memory, integration and political conscience with the story of a love-at-first-sight romance. It is aesthetically captivating and carried by the pace of the narrative and quality performances by its lead actors: Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin.

But just as his script overdoes itself in trying to cover such hot-button topics as head scarves and anti-Semitism, the bombardment of narrative techniques makes it feel as if the helmer is trying too hard to be outlandish, while never being consistently funny.