The Young Lovers (2021) User Reviews

A different love affair

[claytons-247-235960 · 8/10 · 25 September 2022]

A different love affair, very well done. Why is it that we unthinking accept older men with much younger women, but jib at the reverse? Fanny Ardant might well change some minds - this was unquestionably a great role for her. Fortunately the rest of the cast are up to her standard. Some humour, some pathos, and a story line that knows where it's going, though perhaps falters a little at the end (a couple of times I thought, is this the closing shot? When it wasn't)

Well filmed in a variety of locations - though I doubt the Kinsale tourist bureau will be promoting this film! Most attractive and appropriate music, too.

French HAROLD AND MAUD

[searchanddestroy-1 · 25 January 2023]

Or A french mix-up between LOVE STORY, BOOBY DEERFIELD or SUMMER OF 42. I mean the tragic love story between a man and an older woman, much older, not only a couple of years. And also a tragic love story where one of them is about to die, condemned in advance because of a disease. It is obviously made to make audiences weep. Of course it is gripping, poignant, French are excellent in this element, and acting is over the top; though Fanny Ardant may annoy many audiences whom I belong to. But it is an personal opinion, and here she is purely awesome, better than usual. She is actually annoying in interviews with journalists, on TV sets, not his her films. But if you can forget this, and it is possible to, that's a great French melodrama. You won't be deceived. This poignant movie seems also to be a tribute to Annie Girardot, because Fanny Ardant's role looks very like Girardot's performances when she was at her peak. They show in this film a very short sequence of UN HOMME QUI ME PLAIT, from director Claude Lelouch. The sequence I prefer here is the one when Melvil Poupaud's wife - Cecile De France - comes to visit her husband's lover - Ardant - and tells her: "My husband needs you". And not in a cynical nor offensive or agressive way, but only gripping. I nearly wept. It is so rare, so beautiful. SO RARE.....

A web of lies

[Aatchoum · 3/10 · 10 February 2022]

Very well directed and acted. And it's all.

Because the script is a web of lies. The screenwriter tries to make us believe that in real life it is possible for a 45-year-old oncologist and a 70-year-old woman to really fall in love with each other. It's absurd. And it's so stupid to make believe that older women would fall in love with oncologists while young women would be more seduced by emergency doctors... But in an ideal world where no one is afraid of the gaze of others? In an ideal world, the 45-year-old husband does not cheat on his wife and children to go with a 70-year-old wife, and the 70-year-old wife does not try to turn the 45-year-old husband away from his wife and children. Yes, but he is an oncologist specializing in experimental treatments : -> Just because he specializes in experimental chemotherapy doesn't mean he has to specialize in experimental love... And this oncologist also knows how Parkinson's disease evolves, and he also knows that many other diseases and a whole host of ill health can plague the daily lives of older people, and a fall is more likely to cause a femoral neck fracture than a simple bone crack. Each age has its pleasures and one should not mix the generations neither at this age, nor at an even more advanced age, nor younger. My thinking, and this kind of film won't make me change it, is: above all, you have to enjoy life when you're young because time passes very quickly, and you have to learn to manage your loneliness other than by drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes (the 2 characters in the film who suffer from loneliness smoke like chimneys) because sooner or later we are all alone. And no need for a cinema that pretends to have found an experimental sentimental remedy. I wasted 2 hours of my time. And the time lost cannot be made up.

A wonderful film but definitely not for a young audience who has no idea about love

[keller-20652 · 10/10 · 26 October 2023]

I'm not French, but thank's God I'm also not an American who has to watch the boring love stories produced by Hollywood, where for years the screenwriters have not been able to come up with a unique script and have gone back to making insulting remakes of European films. This wonderful and heart-pounding French made film was written in collaboration with the French Icelandic screenwriter SOLVEIG ANSPACH, who passed away from breast cancer (ringing?) in 2015. At the end of the film, the subtitles honor her memory. And now that everything has been said about the background, it is definitely a gem. Delicate direction in close-up to catch the smallest expressions of the actors who all but all, and not only the main ones, play the characters magnificent. The soundtrack, some will say that it helps the tears to flow is perfect. And for those skeptics who wonder if such an impossible love is possible between a 45 year old man and a 71 year old woman then yes. Look around you, maybe it's rare, but it exists. Maybe some of them are the rich old woman's pursuit of money, but some of them are pure love, sometimes tragic like in this movie.

Love French Cliché

[km768 · 10/10 · 8 June 2022]

The beauty of the film lies in this fine and delicate way of describing the existential brilliance that such an encounter can give rise to, and the explosions that it will inevitably cause in the entourage of the protagonists. The secondary characters are incredibly strong, the script takes the time to make them exist, giving them a depth in their own existence. And not to forget that we watch french movie, here are some cliches to be seen as usual: deep, original smoking-not pretending, full apartments with everything especially books and paintings. And of course the French Bistros.