The Names of Love
In this witty satire, French filmmaker Michel Leclerc establishes himself as a great comic chronicler of contemporary French-Jewish life. A triumph at this year's Cannes Film Festival, this delightful film is about a fortysomething Jewish scientist who falls in love with a flamboyant Algerian beauty.
He is the unassuming son of a Frenchman and a Jewish mother whose parents perished in the Holocaust. She is the impassioned daughter of a 1970s Parisian hippie and an Algerian immigrant worker. After an initial spat on a radio show, the pair falls in love.
Though such a romance may seem improbable, the film's wonderful conceit is that these two characters, whose families were afflicted by two of the worst tragedies in recent French history - the Vichy régime for the Martins and the Algerian War for the Benmahmouds - are, in fact, destined to form a perfect couple. Ah, if only life could be so simple!
With Jacques Gamblin (star of many Claude Lelouch films, as well as Jacques Becker's
Children of the Marshlands) as Arthur, and the incandescent Sara Forestier as Bahia.
