By: Skip Shefield
The 1960s hippie credo “Make Love Not War” takes on new meaning in “The Names of Love,” the winner of this year’s Caesar, the French equivalent of Academy Award for Best Picture, now playing at FAU’s Living Room Theaters.
The lovely lover is one Baya Bernahmoud (Sara Forestier), a young woman of Algerian descent and now living in France. Baya decries the discrimination against African-born and Muslim French citizens who have flocked to France in large numbers for a better life. Baya wages a one-woman battle to change the minds of right-wing, wealthy, bigoted men of power by seducing them one at a time while arguing for more moderate, compassionate policies. Ironically Baya is the daughter of a French heiress who has expressed her rebellion by marrying an Algerian refugee (Zinedine Soualem).
Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamlin) is the forty-something, rational, serious son of a nuclear scientist (Jacques Boudet) who is a veteran of the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence. Arthur’s mother (Michelle Moretti) is a Jew haunted and traumatized by being the only survivor of her family in the wake of the Holocaust.
Arthur works for a government health agency. We see him examining dead birds for a feared bird flu epidemic.
Because of his job and common name, Baya assumes Arthur is ultra-conservative. She is wrong.
“Names of Love,” written by director Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi, is an opposites-attract romantic comedy not unlike “Annie Hall.” Leclerc in fact is an avowed admirer of Woody Allen, but he has adapted the form to French sex farce with serious themes thrown in.
It’s a frothy mixture with plenty of nudity and sex, of course you can also find a lot of this in live cams sites like ehocams.com. Maybe this is French way of dealing with the very serious problems that exist today in France’s multi-cultural society. I have always felt that laughter is a very healthy medicine. If this film doesn’t change any minds, at least Leclerc will have tried.
Two and a half stars