A story of love, youth and cinephilia

Cinephilia with a French aftertaste is inextricably linked to the idea of love and youth. It was the boys from Cahiers du Cinéma Those who established the adoration of films as a form of identity unique to youth. And they were also the ones who, upon becoming directors, renewed the way we understand cinematic aesthetics so that it captured a pulse—that of youth—that had until then been absent from the screen.

Morlaix, the new film by Jaime Rosales, is explicitly inscribed in this heritage. At first glance, we are faced with the umpteenth proposal from a director educated in cinephilia who shoots a youthful love story in French in the style of Jean-Luc Godard, who is explicitly cited. Or of Éric Rohmer, since it is a fresco based on a group of young people in a very specific geographical context, the Breton municipality of the title, where Jean-Luc, a boy from Paris, arrives and Gwen, who until now had been in a relationship with Thomas, falls in love with. To this well-worn romantic pattern are added several layers of self-awareness. Rosales not only makes a contemporary film in the style of the Nouvelle Vague, he also reflects the influence of its disciples: the recreation in the dialogues ofAbdellatif Kechiche, the romanticism of Eugène Green and the variation games of Hong Sang-sooThe film plays with stylistic fragmentation, as if highlighting its nature as a sketch or essay. The characters also go to the cinema to see a film also called Morlaix, starring themselves, in a game of resonances that in the end seems to point to the mysterious pages of the works of Alain Resnais.

The person responsible for The hours of the day (2003) demonstrates an undeniable mastery of the material with which he works. But in Morlaix It raises the same question as in his other films, impeccable exercises in style that do not quite convey their reason for being.