L'Amour dure trois ans (Love Lasts Three Years) (愛情保鮮期三年)

Love lasts three years (L'Amour dure trois ans) is the first feature film of Frédéric Beigbede based on his own novel. It's a crazy romantic French comedy about the love life of a TV literary and entertainment critic with aspirations of becoming a writer whose life-style and philosophy are in different ways paralleled by those of his best friend and his father.

As the film opens we hear Marc Marronnier (Gaspard Proust) voice off telling us that part of the perks of his profession is that he got a good life and unlimited free access to various hottest nightspots in Paris whilst being shown snippets of the same but that did not appear to make him any happier because he was in the middle of a divorce with his wife, whom he happily married just three years ago. As a result of the trials and tribulations of this painful process, he developed a cynical theory that love can never last more than three years. But that's not where he stopped. He actually started writing a book about it to let off the steam of its venom. We see him receiving for the manuscripts of his novels one rejection letter after another from publishers like Flammarion and other better known French publishers which advised him either never ever to send his manuscripts to them again or even worse, to give up the idea of being a writer altogether. And worse, there were rumors that he would soon be replaced as the anchor for the cultural TV programme. But shorlty after he finished his book "Love Lasts Three Years" in which he wrote "in the first year, you bought furniture, in the second, you move the furniture and in the third, you divide the furniture", he received a letter telling him to go for a meet-up about its possible publication. He  went, saw the editrice Francesca Vernesi,(Valérie Lemercier) and got an advance of 60,000 francs but on condition that he uses a pseudonym, something which did not present any difficulties: he just picked up the first Russian name he saw, got his advance and proceeded immediately to his favorite nightclub  to celebrate his success with his buddies  all of whom follow the philosophy that no love found there would last more than a few weeks or even one night. But in the middle of his revelry, he got a telephone call: his grandma who stayed married for 57 years was dead ! He had to go to Pays Basque for the funeral. There he met Alice (Louise Bourgoin), his cousin's (Antoine) wife, a photographer who lives according to her feelings of the moment. He was electrified and didn't lose any time. They had a wonderful time at the beach and then in bed. Since then, he could never get her out of his mind despite all attempts at diverting himself including going to a personal table dance joint with 4 or 5 dancers, waitress etc. In the meantime, his book became a runaway best-seller, he was asked to
autograph his books by his female fans who would leave their telephone
number with him and he could have anything he wanted. But Alice rejected all his text messages because she was in total disagreement with his theory once she learned that he was in fact the real author of that scandalously sexist book. To his surprise, his book even won an important book prize and during the televised award ceremony, he made an open declaration of love to her. After that, Alice took a plane and ran to him, a little just past the three years she was married to his cousin Antoine, although their love started before then! The film ends. There were also a sub-plot in which his father took up an Asian girl and his buddy Jean-Georges (Joey Starr) hooked up with a beach boy in Australia and even went through an exotic Hindu-like New Age-type marriage ceremony administered by an Indian guru in the middle of a compulsory break there as "advised"  by his publisher because he kept on messing up his own career by offensive remarks to journalists at public interviews and another little developed sub-plot in which his father advised him to make his love life last for as long as he was physically able to.

The film has got its idyllic moments and does give us a glimpse of the mindless sensual pleasures indulged in and ultimately the emptiness of the emotional life of certain pseudo-intellectuals in the Parisian cultural scene. Frédéric Beigbede may have wanted to show us how life always defeats any attempts at generalization and the futility of any theory about it, especially where love is concerned. But if so, that remains more in the imagination than in the actual materialisation of that thought in the film on the screen we see. That point is just not brought to our attention with any real impact. It seems to me that the director may not have any clear ideas about where exactly he wishes to go: undecided whether it's to be a pure comedy or something rather more serious than a middle class
housewife type romantic fantasy. There may be some witticisms, some sarcasms and some good acting but in the end, it's little more than a pleasant enough way of spending an hour or so in the darkened atmosphere of a small cinema