If you had to assign a figurative shape to the trio-based love affair that is at the, ahem, heart of Benoit Jacquot’s 3 Hearts, you might say it resembles something of a triangle. Why has no one else ever conceived of a love triangle before? It’s so obvious. And yet Jacquot seems astounded by this revelation, as if the concept of intersecting yet broken relationships is new to him.
Marc (Benoit Poelvoorde), a tax auditor, misses his train one dismal evening. This apparently pisses him off, as witnessed by the overblown way he mews and stomps like a child who’s just lost his favorite toy to a schoolyard bully. “I often miss my train,” he says shortly thereafter, although his petulant reaction implies otherwise. Marc stops by a cafe for some mineral water to dull the pain when a young woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) comes in to pick up a pack of cigarettes. Marc, doing that thing guys in movies do, decides to flee the cafe and follow her. She, in turn, quickly fulfills the role of “easily wooed women” and spends the evening smoking and talking with Marc. They must have some profound conversation to which the audience is not privy, because by morning, they’ve fallen in love and are ready to spend the rest of their lives longing for one another, so they arrange to meet again.
The woman, whose name is revealed to be Sylvie (her insistence to withhold her name is one of many plot contrivances), decides to leave her husband, who doesn’t seem like such a bad guy, and hops a train to Paris. But, in a vaguely racially problematic scene involving two Chinese businessmen who don’t speak any French, Marc ends up missing their appointment by mere seconds. Of course, it turns out that Sylvie runs a shop with her sister Sofie (Chiara Masroianni, who doesn’t have much to do here). Sofie needs help doing her taxes, and Marc, being the only accountant around, provides assistance. Soon they’re married, while Sylvie is stuck with her milquetoast husband. C’est la vie.
Devoid of subtlety and grace but rife with manufactured sorrow, 3 Hearts does just about everything slightly wrong. Just wrong enough to ring false, from the tin-eared dialogue to its oblivious reliance on clichés. But what’s most egregious is the way Jacquot wastes the prodigious talents of his cast. Instead of writing flesh-and-blood characters, Jacquot settles for innately gloomy, frustrating miscommunications. These paper-thin people are defined exclusively by their romantic woes, which aren’t half as tragic as they want us to think. Thankfully, Gainsbourg happens to be an expert brooder. A desperate longing hangs heavy on her face when her character parts with Marc for the first time. Something wild percolates behind those eyes; maybe it’s love, or lust, or perhaps it’s just the desire to inject some feeling and mystery into a lifeless, schematic movie.
There’s one overpowering aspect to 3 Hearts, though, and that’s the misguided score. From the opening seconds, horns and strings swell and blare like Whitman’s barbaric yawp, letting us know, with all the subtlety of a cinder block falling on your face, that something bad is going to happen. The less-melancholic piano arpeggios that follow the Hans Zimmer sounds don’t fit at all, as if Bruno Coulais wrote the score without any knowledge of what the film was even about.
There are a few nice directorial touches, such as the camera distractedly turning to catch a passing car, effectively mimicking Marc’s wavering attention for his wife; or the camera pushing forward, following Sofie walking out the door on the right side of the frame while an opaque picture of her and her now former-husband (Marc’s predecessor) resides on the left side. But for the most part, Jacquot fails to instill any sort of unique style. While competently directed, 3 Hearts looks as bland as it feels. Perhaps it’s to his credit that Jacquot never attempts to use flashy visuals to distract viewers from his middling, mundane film. But for a film so replete with artificial drama and broody bombast, few moments of emotion ever inspire or resonate.
