‘Filmlovers!’ Review: Arnaud Desplechin Gets Back on Track With a Breezy but Thoughtful Ode to Cinephilia
No major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice. French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen. In either language, it’s impassioned enough to earn its exclamation point.
Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber form than in his recent narrative features “Deception” and “Brother and Sister,” “Filmlovers!” is formed of two halves, nimbly interleaved by editor Laurence Briaud. One is pure documentary, mixing the director’s first-person reflections with talking-head interviews and a surfeit of lovingly chosen film clips that aren’t identified by title — Desplechin seemingly wanting to either prompt viewers’ own filmgoing memories or stoke their curiosity regarding scenes they don’t recall. The second is a semi-autobiographical narrative film that revives a fictionalized alter ego from the director’s past work: Paul Dédalus, the gawkily charming would-be intellectual whose field of study shifts from film to film.
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We last encountered Dédalus in the director’s similarly autofictional 2015 feature “My Golden Days” — following other appearances in 1996’s “My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument” and 2008’s “A Christmas Tale” — where he was an anthropologist. This time, aligning even closer with his creator, he’s an obsessive cinephile, progressing from precocious pre-teen movie buff to adolescent film-club founder to 30-year-old filmmaking student. Even at the latter stage, however, it’s film-watching that consumes him more than anything else: “Cinema is a question, not an answer,” says the adult Dédalus (Salif Cisse), and Desplechin presumes no more authority on the maker’s part than the viewer’s.
He certainly asks plenty of questions. A simple but effective highlight of the film’s documentary portion is a series of vox pop-style interviews with regular, unidentified cinemagoers, giving frequently idiosyncratic answers to straightforward prompts, from the first film they remember seeing to where in the theater they prefer to sit. One young woman’s favorites range from the “Mission: Impossible” franchise to “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” while a teenage girl reflects on how her existing passion for “West Side Story” was bolstered by Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake, to the point of inspiring her to write musicals of her own. Given the audience-minded focus here, it’s fitting that these voices are as prominently featured as the film’s interviews with comparably learned figures, among them critic-turned-filmmaker Kent Jones (a past collaborator with Desplechin on the film “Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”) and literary critic Shoshana Felman.
“Filmlovers!” touches on key points of film history — puckishly stating that “America invented the first films, but France found cinema,” as it traces the medium’s early evolution from Edison to the Lumière brothers — and film theory, touching on ideas advanced by André Bazin and Stanley Cavell, but its tone remains conversational rather than didactic. The study of film, like film itself, is presented as a buffet from which the spectator can pick and choose as they will. In a lovely dramatized scene that bridges the film’s fiction and non-fiction conceits, a young cinephile gets chatting at a café to famed philosopher Sandra Laugier (playing herself), who echoes Desplechin’s accommodating perspective: Asked what constitutes “reality” in cinema, she genially replies, “If you ask the question, you’re awake.”
Lest this all feel a bit too loose-fittingly general, Desplechin takes illuminating diversions into more particular fixations of his, including his forever haunted relationship as a viewer to Claude Lanzmann’s seminal documentary “Shoah,” and his ongoing grief over the untimely death of Indigenous American actor Misty Upham, who worked with the director on the aforementioned “Jimmy P.” As a friend and collaborator, he mourns Upham herself; as a spectator, he mourns the films she never got to make. These sidebars are selective but not arbitrary, instead encapsulating Desplechin’s efforts to maintain a consciousness as a film-viewer that stands apart from his identity as a filmmaker, even as one inevitably informs the other.
Still, it’s in the film’s scripted vignettes about Dédalus’ cinephilic coming-of-age — glowingly shot by Noé Bach and wittily performed by an ensemble that includes “Anatomy of a Fall” breakout Milo Machado-Graner as Dédalus’ adolescent incarnation — that “Filmlovers!” feels most intimately personal, tracing the character’s (and by presumed extension, Desplechin’s) growth as a filmgoer over the years. The provincial teenager who nervously commutes to Lille to buy a ticket for Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” is rewarded with a revelatory sense of emotional empathy from its anguished closeups — despite the ticket cashier’s warning that he’ll be bored.
It’s an experience bigger, if no less formative, than raptly watching Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” on a tiny television set while his family bickers over lunch. That sense of naïve wonder may be lost by the time he’s a college-age lothario mansplaining Coppola to a potential girlfriend, but not his reverence for what he watches. “Filmlovers!” cheerfully makes the point that we grow with cinema, and cinema with us. On the evidence of this fizzy little film, Desplechin’s not done growing yet.
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