Along Came Love Review: Charting a Course Through Decades of Deceit

The initial frames of Katell Quillévéré’s Along Came Love plunge us into that most queasy of historical moments: the supposed liberation of France, circa 1945. Newsreel cheers, the GIs are here, hurrah. But the camera, like a restless spirit, doesn’t linger on the bunting. Instead, it veers sharply into the shadows where liberation’s uglier sibling, retribution, is busy at work.

We witness the ritualistic shaming of women, the femmes tondues, their heads shorn as a brutal public penance for liaisons (forced, chosen, who can say?) with the occupiers. This isn’t just backdrop; it’s the film’s original sin, staining everything that follows.

From this maelstrom of collective judgment emerges Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), her own hair freshly shorn, a swastika daubed on her pregnant belly – a walking, breathing symbol of national disgrace and intimate betrayal. She is a woman already burdened, already carrying the weight of a past that will stretch its tendrils across the ensuing decades. The film signals, with a quiet dread, a long journey through the evolving landscape of personal secrets and their societal echoes.

The Architecture of Convenience

Fast forward a few years, the rawest wounds of war now scarred over, and Madeleine is a waitress in Normandy. She’s a single mother to young Daniel, a child whose existence is a constant, silent reminder of her past transgression. The air she breathes is thick with a certain kind of post-traumatic societal chill, a hushed disapproval that clings to her like the scent of stale Gauloises. Her relationship with Daniel is…fraught. He is less a son, one feels, than an animate piece of evidence.

Enter François (Vincent Lacoste), a bespectacled, limping PhD student, exuding an air of fragile intellect and bourgeois comfort. He’s the sort who toasts in ancient Greek – a charming, if slightly ostentatious, flourish. Their courtship is swift, almost perfunctory, a meeting of two separate, carefully concealed desperations.

She, seeking a cloak of respectability, a bulwark against penury; he, one suspects from his averted gaze during moments of conventional affection, seeking something else entirely. Their marriage is thus less a romantic union than a pragmatic pact, a carefully constructed edifice built upon the shaky foundations of what remains unsaid.

Madeleine is candid, to a degree, about her past. François, however, keeps his own cards (and desires) clutched very close to his elegantly tailored vest. The resulting tension is a low hum beneath their polite exchanges, a kind of marital froid-eur.

A Ménage à Moi? Navigating the Decades of Detour

The carefully constructed life of Madeleine and François inevitably encounters stress fractures. A figure from François’s pre-Madeleine existence – a spurned male lover, naturally – enacts a fiery revenge, incinerating their Parisian apartment and, with it, any illusions of a straightforward domestic narrative. One does wonder if spontaneous combustion by jealous ex-lovers was a statistically significant hazard in 1950s Paris, or if this is merely melodrama’s helpful hand.

They flee, as characters in such tales often do, to the provinces. Châteauroux, to be exact, a town then bustling with American GIs from a nearby military base. Here, our protagonists reinvent themselves as proprietors of a rowdy jazz club, a suitably atmospheric setting for the next chapter of their unconventional arrangement.

The club, and indeed the American presence, introduces a new variable: Jimmy (Morgan Bailey), a Black American serviceman. He becomes an object of fascination, then affection, for both Madeleine and François, leading to a tentative, somewhat bewildering, exploration of a three-way intimacy.

Is this a genuine emotional entanglement, a shared seeking of solace, or simply the next available distraction in lives predicated on avoidance? The film offers few easy answers, letting the ambiguity hang in the smoky club air, thick as the trumpet solos.

Through glimpses of news reports – the far-off rumble of the Vietnam War, for instance – the decades slide by. A daughter arrives, another life woven into this increasingly complex tapestry of compromise. The social conservatism of the era presses in, yet within their peculiar bubble, they find a strange, precarious equilibrium. Or do they?

The Un-Aging Agonies of Compromise

At the heart of this decades-spanning narrative are characters etched with the acid of their secrets. Anaïs Demoustier’s Madeleine is a study in contained resilience. She navigates her compromised life with a steely pragmatism, though moments of profound weariness, even a chilling abruptness towards her son, flicker across her expressive face.

Her strength is palpable, but so is the immense cost of her tightly held secrets. Vincent Lacoste, as François, portrays a man perpetually at war with himself, his intellectual pursuits a seeming refuge from the societal condemnation his true nature would invite. His performance is one of subtle discomfort, a man trying to wear a life that never quite fits, like an ill-chosen suit.

And then there is Daniel, played by a succession of young actors, the perennial casualty of his parents’ carefully curated deceptions. His journey from a confused, attention-starved boy to an adult grappling with a fractured identity is perhaps the film’s most direct emotional through-line.

He is the living embodiment of their unacknowledged truths, his pain a constant, uncomfortable counterpoint to their attempts at forging a functional existence. The film excels in moments of unspoken communication – a shared glance, a hesitant touch, a door left pointedly ajar – that speak volumes where words would only simplify.

Themes of shame, the relentless human search for connection, and the myriad forms love (or its approximation) can take are explored with a quiet intensity. Interestingly, the principal actors age with remarkable subtlety – a touch of grey here, a slightly more ‘sensible’ haircut there – perhaps a knowing nod to the idea that the deepest wounds, the most defining secrets, keep one in a state of suspended emotional development, forever young in their unresolved pain. Or maybe the makeup budget was simply modest.

Along Came Love premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2023, and was released in France on November 29, 2023.

Full Credits

Director: Katell Quillévéré

Writers: Katell Quillévéré, Gilles Taurand

Producers: Justin Taurand, David Thion, Philippe Martin

Executive Producers: Jean-Yves Roubin, Cassandre Warnauts

Cast: Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Morgan Bailey, Hélios Karyo, Josse Capet, Paul Beaurepaire, Margot Ringard Oldra, Ambre Gollut, Luc Bataini, Virginie Tardy, Evelyne Tardy, Sébastien Depommier, Anne See, Marc Brunet, Eugène Marcuse, Vincent Sornaga, Simon Rérolle, Thibault Maunoury, Maxime De Toledo, Cyril Durel, Aaron Kahn, Maud Léone, Emmanuel Bellet, Dylan Hawkes, Michel Masiero, Suzanne De Baecque, Mounia Raoui, Emmanuelle N’Zuzi, Léo Maindron, Bluenn Salaun, Pierre Ngongang, Djibril Galy, Cif Eddine Gadra, Christian Starr Lassen, Vincent Schmitt, Alice Piatier, Marine Veirun, Adrien Casse, Susana Alcantud, Stéphane Mercoyrol, Bertrand Bossard, Jean-Noël Martin, Jowee Omicil

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Tom Harari

Editor: Jean-Baptiste Morin

Composer: Amine Bouhafa