So here it is – the third but, incredibly, perhaps not the final episode in the most bizarre arthouse franchise in film history, and which, for its sheer melodramatic ker-aziness it commands attention. So, as it were, previously on Mektoub My Love …
The first film in the series from Tunisian-French directorAbdellatif Kechiche, who had won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (for which he was famously required to share the award with his two acting leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux), arrived in 2017. This first MML (called Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno) turned out to be an epic erotic summer romance set in the early 90s about a guy called Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) who comes back from Paris to his hometown of Sète, having abandoned his medical studies to follow his dream of being a screenwriter, and finds himself immersed in his friends’ intrigues; Ophélie (Ophélie Bau) is engaged to a guy away doing military service, but having an affair with Amin’s cousin Tony (Salim Kechiouche).
But the follow-up, Mektoub My Love: Intermezzo from 2019 was one of the most gobsmackingly weird films ever shown at Cannes: a 212-minute drama featuring a mind-bending continuous three-hour sequence set over one evening in a nightclub. It also showed more of Kechiche’s new softcore sex enthusiasm and obsession with female buttocks. Was this experimentalism deliberate? Was Kechiche, like Walerian Borowczyk before him, a serious director pivoting to arthouse-erotica for good? Aghast audiences wondered if they were witnessing a midlife male breakdown in real time.
Now the third film is here and … well, it’s shorter at least – just two and a quarter hours, and the only explicit sex is at the end. As with the previous films, the characters’ most serious personal problems seem to co-exist with a dreamily laidback attitude from one and all. But then there is a staggering finale, which had the Locarno audience gasp and splutter with incredulous shock.
The situation now is that big-shot Hollywood producer Jack (Andre Jacobs) has improbably come to town with his poutingly discontented young TV star wife Jessica (newcomer Jessica Pennington). He claims that Jessica tried out for the Taxi Driver role that went to Jodie Foster and it’s not clear if this transparent untruth – Pennington and Foster are patently not the same generation – is deliberate. The couple show up at Tony’s family restaurant demanding service, and Amin and Tony wind up delivering couscous to their luxury villa. Amin shows Jack his screenplay – which Jack apparently loves – and Tony does a lot of very dangerous flirting with Jessica. The scene is set for a monumental farcical meltdown.
And where on earth are we going with this, given that the last shot of Amin running appears to leave the way open for yet another baffling episode of Mektoub My Love? Could it be a surreal film project that will continue to evolve on an almost improvisational basis? Maybe so.
