Critics reviews

There’s a casual mastery to latter-day Garrel that reveals a filmmaker who knows his craft inside and out and knows how to achieve the maximum effect with the simplest means. Even a shot of three characters sitting around a kitchen table (of which there are quite a few here) becomes a rich study in human interaction under Garrel’s gaze; and as for the closeups, they are, as usual, painterly, probing, and mesmerizing.

Running just over an hour, Lover for a Day is a work of radical compression. It’s the kind of film that could easily be written off as a minor work if it wasn’t so clear that this austerity is the product of a seasoned master in total control of his form.

At first sight, Lover for a Day might seem like a collection of moments, emphasized by a superbly economic editing that lets go of transitions. This simplicity is deceptive. Philippe Garrel creates not really a narrative arc, but a narrative braid: Jeanne can only find personal redemption through Ariane's journey. It is a story of sacrifice, and in stories of sacrifice the casual moments tend to guard minor revelations.

Garrel fills the wide screen with a ravishment of tones, from inkiest black to crystalline white and every imaginable gray in between. There's a deceptive casualness to his visuals. Every image looks harmonious without being fastidious, which means that you see the picture rather than the intention. Yet even when you see the thought behind his images, the gentle disorder of his characters' lives, with their patched walls and messes, creates an inviting informality that strengthens his realism.

Philippe Garrel's venerable mode of personal filmmaking exalts intimate life as fragmented melodrama, but his latest film plays more like an unintentional self-parody. . . . The movie is methodically sexual but emotionally remote, and the romantic entanglements are neither self-revealing nor self-deprecating—they're as detached as an equation.

I'm a lifelong sucker for Garrel, but I'm filled with a special admiration in the face of the ‘trilogy of female desire' formed by Jealousy, In the Shadow of Women and now Lover for a Day. Using a 75 minute, black-and-white, widescreen format across the series, Garrel and his phalanx of writers compress the usual dynamics of his films, finding new tones of melodrama and comedy alongside the usual melancholia. They are perfect movies.

There's a casual mastery to latter-day Philippe Garrel that reveals a filmmaker who knows his craft inside and out and knows how to achieve the maximum effect with the simplest means. Even a shot of three characters sitting around a kitchen table (of which there are quite a few here) becomes a rich study in human interaction under Garrel's gaze; and as for the closeups, they are, as usual, painterly, probing, and mesmerizing.

Everyone here is on the make or worried their partner is, which can be bleakly funny if you're in the market to laugh at e.g. this blunt exchange between two men: "Fidelity, how did that go?" "Badly." Lover traffics in a (there's no real other way to put this, reductive though it may be) extremely French conception of relationships as inevitably prone to dissolution regardless of if/when (and it's almost inevitably going to be the latter) infidelity enters the equation.

Philippe Garrel's filmography has doubled as a form of family psychoanalysis, looking at his father, himself and son Louis. Now it's daughter Esther's time to take the lead in this typically gorgeous widescreen black-and-white — non-fans of his super-Gallic adultery dramas need not apply.

The film is distinguished by its immersion into the desires and contemplations of young women; we're no longer in their shadow, as it were. Ariane's yearning to be sexually adventurous within a monogamous relationship and Jeanne's longing for the man who broke up with her are dilemmas that Garrel treats with equal sensitivity and focus, and while each woman winds up on opposite ends of fulfillment, the film skirts any trace of moralism. Desire remains as mysterious and contradictory as ever.

The French veteran spins an equally economical tale around the shifting bonds formed between a young woman spurned, her academic father, and his new girlfriend of the same age, the luminous camerawork picking out windows and doors, sliding down facades and along buildings and corridors, and alighting on bodies—dancing, naked, wracked by emotion. The way Garrel positions love between the anguished and the matter of fact may be entirely familiar by now, but is ravishing all the same.

The story is quotidian, but the performances have a low-key psychological charge, and the images—exquisitely shadowed black-and-white 35mm— give the narrative a timelessness that is precisely the point of Garrel's enterprise.