An anxious brunette does a lot of running around a European city trying to figure out who she loves. She’s witty, she smiles a lot, and ends up with an older man. All this takes place in a movie that premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. This isn’t The Worst Person in The World – this is Anaïs in Love, a strikingly similar film from France that enjoyed a limited release in the US on April 29th.
Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier), the aforementioned anxious brunette, is a thirtysomething grad student writing a dissertation on the representation of passion in literature. After splitting with her boyfriend, Anaïs is lonely and struggling to make rent in an apartment she got thinking it would be for two. She meets an older man named Daniel (Denis Podalydès), and the two begin an affair. When Daniel says he can’t keep up cheating on his partner, Anaïs curiously develops a connection with said partner, the brilliant novelist and essayist Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), and quickly falls in love with her.
The protagonist feels familiar in a sea of funny brunette white women with unspecified mental illness and relationship troubles (Fleabag, Marianne from “Normal People,” Julie from Worst Person, the list goes on). We know who she is from the outset, and she stays more or less the same for the duration of the film. Unfortunately, because her character feels so symptomatic of this recent strain of millennial feminist media, the film doesn’t say anything particularly new or noteworthy.
The one major difference between this film and the others is that it centers, at least for its last hour, on a queer romance. Unfortunately, the result feels derivative of another recent trend of films with melodramatic sapphic longing. Anaïs in Love doesn’t stand out in this field either, despite its references to that genre’s goliath, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Here, queerness is used as a plot device that defines Anaïs as the stereotypical bisexual homewrecker.
Though the film tries to convince you that her passion for Emilie is what Anaïs needed the whole time, the writing and performances don’t sell that narrative. For both important relationships, there’s never a clear link between first meeting and mutual romantic interest. In fact, Anaïs’ behavior with Emilie is so questionable and borderline creepy that it’s unclear how any romantic feelings could form. The only indication of any feelings on Emilie’s part are Tedeschi’s attempts at chemistry, defined entirely by smiling with yearning eyes. That said, Demoustier works overtime to sell her character’s manic soul and manages comedy and vulnerability exceptionally well.
The strongest throughline is its theme of passion. The film’s two sex scenes are neatly contrasted to highlight the nature of Anaïs’ relationships throughout the film and prove to be fruitful territory for the feature. However, for a film built on it, there’s not much passion there. The lack of chemistry between leads is one problem, but another is its hyperactive tendency to cut every scene right before it gets interesting. This technique is an effective reflection of the protagonist’s psyche but leaves the viewer confused and desperate for anything to happen. As a result, side-plots that prove to be far more interesting than the central love triangle are completely dropped and end up being wholly inconsequential towards the development of the protagonist.
For a film that seems to straddle two generic fads, Anaïs in Love proves mediocre in both. While providing queerness as a potential solution to the anxious millennial woman problem, it plays into stereotypes and offers a romance that lacks chemistry. In a vacuum, it’s a decent movie – romantic comedies with large chunks set in gorgeous French country estates usually are – but it proves impossible to remove from the broader context of other, better media. If you’re going to reference Portrait of a Lady on Fire, you have to be at least in the same realm of caliber as Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Sadly, Anaïs in Love proves a forgettable combination of too many far superior pieces.
Anaïs in Love is currently playing in select theaters. The film will be available to view on Digital beginning May 6th.
Director: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Runtime: 98m
Rating: 3 out of 5
Emmy is a big fan of all things TV and movies. Among her current favorites are The Matrix, Midsommar, Titane, and Fleabag. Catch her on Letterboxd @ewenstrup !