‘Anaïs in Love’ Review: A Manic Pixie Dream Girl Evades Analysis in This Feathery French Diversion
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticWhat comes to mind when you picture the likely protagonist of a film titled “Anaïs in Love?” If it’s not a flighty, free-spirited young Frenchwoman, cycling around Paris with flowers in her bike basket, completing a Masters literature thesis (long past deadline) on “17th-century descriptions of passion,” and wearing bright floral sundresses in all weathers, you’ve tried too hard to avoid the obvious — not something you could easily accuse Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s blithe, gossamer-light debut feature of doing in imagining said heroine.
Is it too on the nose if she’s played by reliably winsome starlet Anaïs Demoustier? Don’t answer that: she is.At first rosy blush, then, “Anaïs in Love” appears to gently parody an idealized screen vision of Gallic femininity (a manic pixie dream fille of sorts) that has endured in various incarnations from the French New Wave to “Amelie” and beyond.
To what end is harder to determine, not least since Bourgeois-Tacquet’s film seems at least as besotted with Anaïs as her diverse assortment of past lovers are with her, even as her narcissistic pursuit of pleasure — a trajectory somehow both aimless and ruthlessly single-minded — tests the viewer’s affections.
Some might wonder what “Anaïs in Love” really has to say for itself; the film, perhaps, objects to the idea of young women like its cheerfully confused heroine having to explain themselves at all.
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