Anais In Love (2022): Becoming of Age?

Anais In Love is a somewhat comic coming-of-age film about a young Parisian woman trying to get her life together – although her definition of what that phrase means likely differs from yours or mine.  Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier) is a high-spirited, vivacious, charming and attractive thirty-year-old who hasn’t found her place in life – which is to say, she has not yet settled down. It’s the first feature film helmed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, who wrote and directed.

This may remind you of a similarly themed film released last year, the popular and critically acclaimed Norwegian movie The Worst Person In the World  - a double Oscar nominee (Best Int’l Feature Film, Best Original Screenplay), which also earned a plethora of other nominations and awards, among them the Best Actress award to its lead, Renate Reinsve, at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. 

Both films are entertaining and easy to watch.  Both aim to be more than that. That's where they differ.

The problem for Julie, the protagonist in Worst Person, is that she wants to do the right thing both in her love life and in her search for a career that fits but finds it difficult to stick with any one person or job choice for long. Or in the words of the film’s director, Joachim Trier, his film is an attempt to “look seriously at the difficulties of meeting someone when you’re struggling to figure out your own life; at how irresolute and uncertain even the most rational and otherwise self-confident people can become when they fall in love; and how complicated it is.”

On the other hand, the problem for Anaïs (the character, not necessarily the actress) is not that she’s indecisive or struggling to find a person or situation that fits, like Julie; but rather that she’s inconstant, living only for the moment, or to put it in a more positive light – eager for all the experiences life has to offer. The idea of being ruled by one’s passions seems to be her guiding philosophy, if she has one.  Her thesis, as a perpetual graduate student in literature (does she even have time to read?) has something to do with 'passion' in 17th century literature, but it is way overdue. Anaïs is always in such a hurry. She talks fast. She moves fast. She makes impulsive decisions based on her immediate feelings, often without ever considering long term consequences. 

Anaïs is in the very first frame of the film, and she’s the center of virtually every scene thereafter.  The picture opens as she dashes out of a florist shop, bright, new bouquet of flowers in hand and, smiling, commences to run down the street, accompanied by the lively, ebullient, cheerful piano music of baroque composer Louis Daquin. She dashes along, weaving past other pedestrians, bursts into her building, sprints up a couple flights of stairs to her apartment - where she is late for an appointment with her landlady.  Not, it seems, the least bit winded – or abashed for being late – Anaïs launches into a breezy, mile-a-minute justification for  why the flowers were more important than getting there at the appointed time, offers her visitor some juice or tea, acknowledges she’s two months late with the rent, swears she’s no thief and will find a way to get the money, realizes that she’s late for another engagement, runs to her bedroom, rips off her dress and throws on another – all the while explaining that she meant to live with her boyfriend, but it didn’t work out because she hates sleeping in the same bed with someone, even if she loves them, and on and on. We’re not yet five minutes in, as Anaïs rushes out and on to her next adventure, telling the landlady, “Sorry. You can stay. Slam the door behind you”!  Only then do the opening credits roll. By now we already understand that Anais in Love - both the character and the film - are, shall we say, manic?

The character has oodles of self-confidence but little self-awareness or much concern, if any, for how her words or actions might appear to or affect others. During her brief interaction with the landlady, for instance, she impertinently asks her if she still loves her husband after centuries“ together. Not long after, she meets up with Raoul (Cristophe Montenez), no longer her roommate but still her boyfriend, too late to see the movie he had planned watch with her; and there, she casually lets drop that she’s seven weeks pregnant and will be having an abortion. He’s understandably miffed that this is the first he’s heard about this, and doubly so, because she made her decision without any input from him. She acts like it’s no big deal. Fed up, he tells her “You don’t realize what human interaction is.” They quarrel, but then, succumbing to Anaïs’ undeniable charm, and in spite of himself, Raoul confesses, “Je t’aime”, and they make up. 

The very next scene finds Anaïs in bed, having sex with another man, a man she met in an elevator a few minutes (in the film) earlier. This is Daniel, a man old enough to be her father, and one clearly besotted with this young, très féminin whirlwind. Daniel is a publisher. For a dozen years he has been in a committed relationship with a writer, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedseschi), and while he has no intention of abandoning that, a bit of a fling after twelve years would be pretty exciting. For Anaïs, however, Daniel is not particularly attractive, but more importantly, he’s too careful, too fearful of discovery, too dull; and it soon becomes apparent that the most interesting thing about him is his partner.  Emilie, though twenty-five years older than Anaïs, is intellectual, interesting, somewhat famous, and warmly beautiful in the way of certain women of a certain age.  Anaïs is infatuated and wants to meet her.

Wherein lies the crux of the story. How’s that gonna work out?

Well, for one thing, while Anaïs is the protagonist, Emilie is the most interesting character in the story. She has got depth, wisdom and passion – and as the latter takes hold in the forcefield of Anaïs’s personality, Emilie is both thrilled and astonished.  Exactly what attracts her to Anaïs is less obvious - other than youth, charm and energy, but maybe that’s enough. While this is not made explicit, my sense is that same-sex love affairs have not, in the past, been part of the repertoire. This may also be true for Anaïs, but experience is all of a piece for her, so that’s no big deal.  For writer/director Bourgeois-Tacquet, it has to be a great publicity tool – not yet released commercially, the film has been entered in “queer” film festivals and was nominated for the Queer Palm award at Cannes, though it did not win.  One quite nice thing: the film treats this sexual relationship quite matter-of-factly, without judging or sensationalizing it. Such a stance allows this piece of the narrative to feel comfortable and even natural – except, again, for the huge age difference.

Anais

Earlier, I briefly compared Anais in Love with The Worst Person In the World; and while I haven’t previously reviewed Worst Person, I have seen it, and I'll say with some confidence that it is the superior picture. The similarities are superficial. Both movies feature single white women as protagonists. They even look alike: both are slender, attractive brunettes in their early thirties, vivacious and charming. Both pictures focus more on the women’s love relationships than on their jobs or career choices – although Worst Person at least acknowledges the latter as an issue of concern for its protagonist, who at one point was going to medical school but by the end is biding her time at a far less exacting job. 

Julie

Regarding relationships, Julie and Anaïs are quite different. Julie takes her lovers quite seriously, becoming a part of their lives. Understanding what it means to be in a relationship, she relates and is relatable. She stays with each of the two men that feature most prominently in the story for years at a time, monogamously; Anaïs can’t stay long with anyone, lives alone (and hates literally sleeping with anyone), and believes in following her passion wherever it leads without regard to sexual loyalty. As Raoul points out, she does not know what a real relationship is. With her, there’s no give and take, she does what she chooses, period. In Worst Person, Julie understands the sadness and drudgery that’s part of the territory in any real relationship. She is supportive and empathetic, touching the lives of her lovers deeply. Not so with Anais. She has little to no empathy, and is insensitive to others’ feelings and concerns if they are not aligned with her own. She flees suffering and sadness – a quality made most explicit with respect to her mother’s inoperable cancer diagnosis.  

In both films, the attractive qualities of the lead actresses predominate: they are both charming, vivacious, and easy to watch.  But while Julie seems like a real person, Anais does not. As a result, she ultimately becomes not very interesting. 

One feels that Julie, in Worst Person, has grown quite a bit during the four-year arc of the narrative. Because she is sensitive to others and self-critical, she sees herself as a terrible person, but she’s not. One of her former boyfriends tells her, near the end, that she was the best thing that ever happened to him, and we believe it. 

Not so much with Anaïs. She remains the same impulsive, narcissistic, flighty person we started with - all the way through to the end. She suffers no adverse consequences for her style of living, for the debts she has incurred, the obligations she has failed to meet or the hurts she may have caused; and thus, she has learned nothing. While Bourgeois-Tacquet seems to greatly admire her creation for her certainty and her live-for-my-passion spirit, Anaïs is little more than a sugary, ultimately unlikeable fantasy.  

I should note that Anais in Love  has some quite lovely outdoor photography. As I said at the outset, it is a pleasant, watchable, reasonably entertaining film. If you like watching French pictures  generally, that may be enough. Just know that it's essentially a dressed up piece of fluff overall.  And it aimed to be more than that. 

98 minutes

Grade: B-

Opening in select theaters nationwide on Friday April 29. Including Landmark’s Opera Plaza in San Francisco and Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, CA.  For a theater near you, click HERE

Begins streaming May 8.