Lover for a Day returns the French film-maker Philippe Garrel to his evergreen – or evermonochrome – subjects of sex, jealousy and love. It’s co-scripted by his longtime collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, that great screenwriter whose undimmed interest and skill in plot construction lends sinew to the movie.
This brief, winsome feature is a typically stylish, if ephemeral piece of work in the classic New Wave manner – almost a time capsule. It is an intensely French film in which someone writes a post-coital message to their sleeping lover with lipstick on a mirror before leaving, without a trace of comedy or irony. The setting is the present day, and there’s a scene in which young people in a cafe talk about the immorality of war. Which war? Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria? No: the Algerian war, the one in the 1960s.
Esther Garrel (daughter of Philippe and sister of Louis – and incidentally the actor who played Marzia, who fell poignantly for Timothée Chalamet’s Elio in Call Me By Your Name) is Jeanne, who is devastated at breaking up with her boyfriend and having to move out of his apartment. With no other choice, she shows up unannounced at her dad’s place with a bulging suitcase and a face messy with mascara and tears. This is Gilles (Éric Caravaca), a handsome, divorced philosophy professor. And it is with very mixed feelings that Jeanne discovers that Gilles has a beautiful new live-in girlfriend, Ariane (Louise Chevillotte), who is Jeanne’s age, and is Gilles’s new student – although worrying about the ethics of this is an Anglo-Saxon correctness scruple that doesn’t trouble anyone here.
You might expect jealousy and tension, but Garrel initially sets up something more interesting and subtle. Ariane is generous and loving. Her feelings for Gilles develop into a warm relationship with Jeanne: something between a sister, a cousin or a friend. But the very fact of Jeanne’s presence in their new menage creates a strange new imbalance in the relationship.
Garrel cleverly shows how Gilles – made self-conscious by living with a daughter and girlfriend of the same age, and guiltily feeling that his loyalties should always lie with the daughter – makes an offhand, ill-considered remark to Ariane that future infidelities should not affect their love, which triggers Ariane’s vulnerability and her interest in casual sex with others. Furthermore, Ariane and Jeanne both have (slightly preposterous) secrets that they agree to keep from Gilles. But Garrel shows how this is all a kind of centrifugal force, driving the three of them inexorably apart.
Perhaps nothing very challenging or unexpected happens in this film, and yet there is something grownup and ruminative to its direction and dialogue, and, for all that Garrel has no problem with lingering on women’s naked bodies (Gilles is never shown in the same way), he pays them the compliment of making them real, interesting human beings. They are actually more real and more interesting than the man in their lives.
