VENICE 2020: Lovers
veniceNicole Garcia, after a successful stint as an actress in the 70s and the 80s, where she worked with Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais and Bertrand Blier – just to name a few – decided to pursue a career in directing. Since then, Garcia has directed nine feature films, all sharing similar flaws, such as the overly melodramatic tone, paper thin secondary characters and the lack of tension in key moments. The only thing that makes them worth watching is the good acting of its central performances, such as Marion Cotillard for Mal de Pierres and Catherine Deneuve for Place Vendôme.
Nicole Garcia comes back in the Venice Official Competition after 22 years with Amants, another dull thriller focused on a love triangle, where jealousy and remorse may lead to terrible consequences. Stacy Martin, known for her work in Vox Lux and Nymphomaniac, plays the main character, Lisa, a young woman, who, while on vacation with her husband rekindles an affair with her ex-boyfriend. Having divided the film in three chapters set in different locations, Garcia tries to analyse Lisa’s tumultuous relationships with these two men. The structure of the film itself is rather bad; the director doesn’t make the most out of the different settings, a parisian one at first and an oceanian one later on. Garcia then devotes very little time in developing the relationship between Lisa and Simon, her ex-boyfriend in the first section, while the lack of chemistry between Stacy Martin and Pierre Niney doesn’t do any favour.
There’s a palpable tension that can be felt throughout as the audience is waiting for a final confrontation between the three characters or at least something to happen; Garcia does not exploit it and spends time crafting this melodramatic atmosphere instead, which is really unnecessary.
Acting is quite bad overall and Pierre Niney is the weakest link between the three main performers. The French actor doesn’t really bring the charismatic and charming aura this character really needs, and his wooden expression is quite distracting. Stacy Martin tries her best in this passive role but the writing of her character is somehow limited as the audience never gets the chance to delve deeper into Lisa. Benoît Magimel, who plays Lisa’s husband is stuck in a paper-thin role – he probably has the worst section of the film, adoption as an excuse to entangle Lisa. The writing overall hurts the performances of those actors and at times is laughably bad, like in the overdose scene of the first chapter.
Amants is just another thriller that people will probably forget about after a couple of weeks, and shows once again how basic Nicole Garcia is as a director. The movie should have embraced a more campy or pulpy tone, like Ozon’s Double Lover or Polanski’s Based on a True Story, to craft something entertaining out of this story that has already been told several times.