Team Experience are sharing their favourite love scenes for Valentine's. Here's David from THE city of love...
Murtada was first to share a musical movie moment to celebrate Valentine’s, but, as the famous Shakespeare quote goes, “if music be the food of love, play on…”, and so it is that I bring you an actual Love Song - one of the gentle acoustic numbers of Christophe Honoré’s Les chansons d’amour...
The first of Honoré’s experiments with musical narration, Les chansons d’amour uses composer Alex Beaupain’s soft, winsome songs to tell the story of typically French sexual fluidity; Ismaël's (the ever-sexual Louis Garrel) threeway relationship with Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme is rocked by a death, and among those he meets in his mourning is the younger Erwann (adorable, tousle-haired Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), whose keen interest in him starts to draw him out of his depression. What might sound trite on paper is poignantly and sensitively addressed across the film’s narrative, with Beaupain’s lyrics eschewing metaphor for an ordinary directness, vividly recalling the great Jacques Demy and particularly The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in how it uses the music to express an oscillating variety of emotions in the same low-key timbre, consciously avoiding the generic flamboyance of the musical form as Hollywood knows it.
My favourite number in the film is the tender, erotic but melancholy Ma mémoire sale, in which Ismaël implores Erwann to wash his “dirty memory” clean of the pain of grief. It hardly sounds like a turn-on, sure, but what I continue to treasure about Honoré’s film is its confrontation of how carnality and sadness aren’t mutually exclusive, and how a man’s grief doesn’t need to be buried in order for him to move on. In this exquisite scene, Ismaël is again in sexual longing for two people at once. In this instance, only one is there, and yet Erwann's innocent, earnest difference from Ismaël's previous relationship provides a perfect remedy.
My favourite number in the film is the tender, erotic but melancholy Ma mémoire sale, in which Ismaël implores Erwann to wash his “dirty memory” clean of the pain of grief. It hardly sounds like a turn-on, sure, but what I continue to treasure about Honoré’s film is its confrontation of how carnality and sadness aren’t mutually exclusive, and how a man’s grief doesn’t need to be buried in order for him to move on. In this exquisite scene, Ismaël is again in sexual longing for two people at once. In this instance, only one is there, and yet Erwann's innocent, earnest difference from Ismaël's previous relationship provides a perfect remedy.
Our Valentine's Series
A Room With a View (1986)
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Before Sunset (2004)
The Painted Veil (2006)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Beyond the Lights (2014)