Anaïs in Love

Anaïs in Love

How her father characterizes his daughter, Anaïs, is that she possesses an irresistible charm. What’s even stranger is that he’s right. This woman may always be late for everything; she may tell her whole life story to a stranger on a train; she may trample all over other people’s schedules and hearts and minds, but she does it with such charm and cuteness that not only do these people forgive her (which would be strange enough), they also become enchanted by her too. They forgive her, they indulge her, they follow her around wanting to never stop being kept waiting. Somehow “Anaïs in Love,” the first feature from actor Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, manages to make this work (mostly) largely due to the smart and sprightly lead performance of Anaïs Demoustier.

For most of the movie, Anaïs spends every second sprinting down sidewalks or up stairs or across fields or down hallways or into elevators (she has severe claustrophobia) twenty minutes late for everything, half the time not showing up at all hardly apologizing for keeping people waiting as she blithely chatters past them. Nobody can get a word in edgewise; not even the obviously irritated landlady who wants to know why Anaïs is two months late with the rent. So confident is Anaïs in her “charms” that others’ plain exasperation doesn’t seem to faze her. She talks herself out of anything.

How do you play this character without coming off like an irredeemable narcissist? Demoustier figures it out somehow. She is natural and open; doesn’t push the character as an idea or a concept (key here because Anaïs-as-written is a “type” the dreaded manic pixie dream girl who breezes through lives making people stop and smell the roses, learn to love, etc. But Demoustier doesn’t play her that way), and anyway manic pixie dream girls are usually seen through the eyes of the male characters who adore them. This story is told from Anaïs’s point of view.

When we meet Anaïs, her life is a mess. Her boyfriend Raoul (Christophe Montenez) has moved out; she frets aloud constantly to basically everyone she knows or meets that maybe she’s just not capable of loving someone; Raoul’s nickname for her is “Big Tractor” and he tells her at one point: “You don’t realize what human interaction is”; her mother (Anne Canovas) has cancer, it’s bad; Anaïs’s dissertation on passion in 17th-century literature is going nowhere fast. It’s hard to picture Anaïs sitting down at a library every day for eight hours straight with a stack of books next to her, taking notes. Her thesis adviser gives her organizational tasks and then is understandably annoyed when Anaïs blows it off.

She met Daniel (Denis Podalydès) at a party one night. He is a man who could be her father and whose wife is a successful writer. The two begin an affair almost silently (and without remorse), but it’s not your typical affair. They don’t even have good sex, or any kind of passionate affair for that matter. Then things get even more French and complicated when Anaïs watches Daniel’s wife Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) on TV.

Anaïs reads Emilie’s books, likes the writing and does what anyone would do next: She lightly stalks her. Everywhere she looks, there is Anaïs: book readings, the sidewalk, a literary conference where she has to work odd jobs around the property just to be able to attend.

This may seem like Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” (especially with those women’s hairstyles and all that running). But the vibe is different; it’s less meditative than that film, less mournful. Anaïs never seems in danger of losing herself here, never seems trapped or miserable or wanting more than she has right now or anything like that. It doesn’t seem like she feels bad about anything ever. And this is a problem if not THE problem because a main character who never feels bad about anything ever who never apologizes for anything ever and expects everyone will forgive her well, that’s a Big Tractor rolling through any movie.

The stakes are low in general with “Anaïs In Love.” Demoustier can be maddening at times, yes but watchable always. This film does not see Anaïs as someone we should strive to become inspired by as much as it sees her as someone we should aim to fix or mend; rather than mopeyly sadly dragging us behind her wherever it is she’s going, Anaïs instead seems to be stomping down those stairs and already out that door of her apartment, yelling back up at us: “Goodbye!”

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