‘Filmlovers!’ Review: Arnaud Desplechin Gets Back on Track With a Breezy but Thoughtful Ode to Cinephilia
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic No major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice.
French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen.
In either language, it’s impassioned enough to earn its exclamation point. Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber form than in his recent narrative features “Deception” and “Brother and Sister,” “Filmlovers!” is formed of two halves, nimbly interleaved by editor Laurence Briaud.
One is pure documentary, mixing the director’s first-person reflections with talking-head interviews and a surfeit of lovingly chosen film clips that aren’t identified by title — Desplechin seemingly wanting to either prompt viewers’ own filmgoing memories or stoke their curiosity regarding scenes they don’t recall.
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