Writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s Anaïs In Love bursts out of the gate with all the frenzied energy of its title character (Anaïs Demoustier). Anaïs is a 30-year-old woman with no career path and a rocky grasp of interpersonal relationships, and we meet her as she’s being confronted by her landlady (Marie-Armelle Deguy) for overdue rent. Talking a mile a minute, Anaïs offers excuses and apologies amid a host of deflective comments about her day, her boyfriend, and other topics. All the while, the film’s camera sprints around the young woman, in perfect sync with the cadence of her speech.
At first, the headlong rush of the film’s pacing, along with Anaïs’s unsettled nature, suggests that this might be the latest entry in the so-called “women running” genre. But pay close attention to the opening scene and you’ll see a method to Anaïs’s madness. As she bombards her landlady with unrelated tidbits, the older woman becomes overwhelmed and confused, and soon she’s so beaten down that she no longer seems frustrated over the rent. This prefigures Anaïs’s behavior throughout the film, in which she struggles to articulate what she wants out of life but pursues whatever or whomever catches her eye with shark-like intensity. To paraphrase the Sex Pistols, she doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows how to get it.
Intriguingly, career aspirations are not part of Anaïs’s attempts at self-actualization. When her mother (Anne Canovas) encourages her to take a job at a publishing company to help her network with interesting people, Anaïs curtly responds, “I don’t want to meet interesting people. I want to be interesting.” Instead, her most pressing concern is to find the right romantic partner, which proves to be a challenge. Her current relationship to the punctual, calm Raoul (Christophe Montenez) is on the rocks due to personality differences, and no sooner does she reassure him that her eyes aren’t wandering than the film smash-cuts to her in bed with Daniel (Denis Podalydès), a much older man whom she had been pursuing.
Daniel, too, proves ill-suited to be Anaïs’s lover, but his relationship with an author, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), provides Anaïs with her next fixation. Drawn to a photo of Emilie taken from behind, Anaïs is instantly smitten with the woman, and only more so when she buys the author’s book and begins to fantasize about Emilie reading passages to her. When Anaïs chances upon the woman one day as the latter heads to her publisher, the moment has all the hallmarks of a meet-cute, and it marks the point where the film’s pace suddenly slows as Anaïs seems to finally find what she’s been looking for in life. She gushes like a fan as Emilie reacts with a mixture of flattery and bewilderment, though before she excuses herself, the older woman almost absent-mindedly remarks how beautiful Anaïs is.
Seizing on that slip, Anaïs spends the remainder of the film attempting to woo Emilie, and, at its best, Anaïs In Love is fiercely attentive to the comical way that people obsess over their crushes. Anaïs follows Emilie to a beach resort and begins to contrive a series of chance encounters, and in ways that recall some of the overdetermined encounters planned out by many a Éric Rohmer protagonist. Bourgeois-Tacquet sustains the film’s sedate pace throughout this second half, highlighting the sudden precision and purpose with which Anaïs operates. And as the two women grow closer, the line between Anaïs’s manipulations and the genuine bond and erotic tension that develops between her and Emilie starts to blur.
Anaïs In Love is often funny, not least when Daniel shows up at the beach and is shocked and enraged to catch his one girlfriend in romantic pursuit of the other. But some of the most amusing moments here also have nothing to do with this central romantic entanglement, such as a subplot involving Anaïs’s brother (Xavier Guelfi) being entrusted with a friend’s pet lemur and stupidly giving it some Xanax. And yet, for all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships, and how the little plans that we put into motion in order to stack a romantic encounter in our favor represent the most universal ways in which we attempt to assert order on a random universe.
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