Jeux d'enfants

[Children's Games]
Love Me If You Dare (English Title)

Cast:
Guillaume Canet as Julien Janvier
Marion Cotillard as Sophie Kowalsky
Thibault Verhaeghe as 8 year old Julien
Joséphine Lebas-Joly as 8 year old Sophie

Genre: Romance, Movie

Summary: It starts easily enough - not simply, never simply - with a pretty box, and a pretty girl and a dare the boy has to complete in order to prove to the girl, how important the box is to him.

The game continues, each daring the other for the possession of the box, and the dares only escalate in intensity as they grow older, and the childish refusal to lose, the glee at completing each dare, becomes complicated with feelings which are impossible to ignore.

Review: An utterly gorgeous, completely destructive romance. More beautiful than a train wreck. It's impossibly sweet, from the very beginning, and the entire movie is tinged with a sense of surreality and childishness throughout. What really struck me was how the utter intensity of what they had seemed to transcend all conventional standards of logic and reason. Why else would I accept the way the film ended as a matter of fact without so much as batting an eyelid?

I heard of this through fic. The plot was interesting and I thought I'd like to watch the movie it was based on, eventually. Yesterday, I re-read that fic, looked up the movie on wiki, and I had to watch it. Basically, the ending, what happens, did not come as a surprise to me because I've read it all on wiki before I watched it. All the same, I am glad I watched it because it's a whole different experience to see the story fold out before your eyes and it was ...enchanting.

Upon hindsight, it's probably a very wtf movie, but, while watching it, it was all somehow very natural. No matter how cruel the dares started becoming, to the point of being life-threatening, even, it was still a game. They were still very much just like children.

The ending, despite being mind-fuckery of the highest degree, fit. The sepia-toned what-might-have-been somehow became what is, maybe just in another life time - it was achieved in the only way it could have been in this lifetime, with all that had happened.

...urgh, this is me failing at the words thing again. -_-' Anyway, point is, definitely worth watching.

Music: La Vie en Rose is gorgeous.

Rating: 10/10

Quotes:

~ At Song-Stories ~

Note: So, it's pretty obvious that I'm failing majorly at the whole Fictional Memories 2010 reviewing thing. Because I'm a slacker. /fact. Just thought I'd attempt to at least try reviewing this one since it's my first French film.