Out at the Movies: "Love Songs" ("Les Chansons d'amour")

An honest-to-goodness gay movie opens in NYC today (though you'd never know it from the rather misleading trailer), and will open in more cities in the coming weeks. A full review is in the works, but here's le skinny...

Love Songs, a melancholy French kitchen-sink musical from acclaimed director Christophe Honore, tells the story of a young magazine editor, Ismael (Luis Garrel of Dans Paris), and his beautiful but frustrated girlfriend, Julie (Ludovine Sagnier of Swimming Pool and 8 Women), who have opened their relationship up to a third party, Ismael's colleague, Alice (Clotilde Hesme). The three bounce around the streets of Paris' tenth arrondissiment and sing to one another in twee, breathy tones about lust, selfishness, and love (in that order).

If that all sounds rather dull ... well ... it kind of is.

But after an unexpected tragedy shatters this odd arrangement, Ismael finds himself comforted by a highschool boy named Erwann (Gregoir Leprince-Ringuet) who is smitten with Ismael and determined to seduce him, no matter how stalkery he needs to get to do so. Eventually Ismael relents, but will he accept the love of this man or return to his selfish ways?

Love Songs is odd for a number of reasons, not least of all the fact that the actors wander around and sing to one another for much of it. While it's encouraging to see a universe where sexuality is fluid and largely without judgment (men and women date whomever they feel like, and Erwann, the film's true gay character, is entirely unconflicted about his sexuality), I don't know if achieving that freedom would be worth living around all these exhaustingly precocious people.

Still, in a day when gay characters and gay relationships are almost absent from American screens, it's a rare treat to find a film boasting a steamy gay love scene (with singing, of course!) and gay characters that don't disappear into the background. (And it doesn't hurt that Leprince-Ringuet can rock a pair of orange briefs like it's nobody's business.)

Here's a trailer for the film ... thoughts? One that tickles your fancy?