He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

With gamine de l’heure Audrey Tautou in the lead  À La Folie... Pas Du Tout might be one of any number of French rom-coms but it is in fact a clever black comedy about erotomania, a clinically-defined psychological malady which causes its sufferers to delusionally believe that they are romantically involved with someone oblivious of their infatuation and to act in often very bizarre ways as a result (John Hinckley, Jr. attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan was reportedly occasioned by the erotomanic delusion that the death of the President would cause actress Jodie Foster to publicly declare her love for Hinckley).

The film opens with a very Ozon-like image of roses of many colours framing the wide-eyed face of Tautou, its very excess suggesting the possibility of irony and indeed it builds from that chocolate-box opening into a love story gone very wrong. It does this very neatly, telling the story one way, more or less from Tautou’s character’s perspective, then re-winding and showing us what really was going on independently of her delusional phantasies.

27-year old writer/director Laetitia Colombani, making her feature debut, demonstrates both wickedly mature wit and first class film-making skills. Although one does have to ask how the medics knew to come and save Angelique after she tries to gas herself and then why they wouldn’t have given her the required resuscitation which they would be much better qualified to give than her imagined love interest, the handsome married doctor, Loic (Samuel Le Bihan) this is no more than a minor quibble in what is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek antiphon to Tautou’s signature performance in the smash hit, Amélie (2001).

 

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