NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

ICanNeverThinkOfAGoodUsername Maybe I feel this way towards this film because I'm not French, maybe that is a reason.This film was good and I felt it was going somewhere... Somewhere which had a deep and meaningful ending. However, the ending was a disappointment. When I think back to what happened... I don't see the point of it. There is probably one thing that this film portrays and that's 'things don't always go to plan'. Apart from that I took nothing else away from this film.It's almost like this film ended too soon. I want to know more about the characters and what happens. I feel like I've watched half a film.This film had the potential to be something good but it just didn't get there. It felt meaningful but it really wasn't.However, maybe that is because I'm not French...Spoilers ahead: 1. Why did the woman give that other guy a tape at the end? Was it history repeating itself... What was all that about? 2. What was the woman with the tape up to? That's what gets to me the most...?

Ilpo Hirvonen Coeurs is Alain Resnais 16th feature which he made at the age of 84. This film proved that Alain Resnais still has the same master within, he had in the 1960's. His brilliance and imagination sure didn't stop at Coeurs which he proved in 2009 by making Les herbes folles (Wild Grass), and apparently he is once again making a new film. Alain Resnais has always worked with incredible writers such as Marquerita Duras and Henri Laborit and this time his film is based on an English play 'Private Fears in Public Places' by Alan Ayckbourn. Coeurs is no blind visualization of an already-told story but an insightful look at the world of today, relationships, modern society and the conventional genre of romantic comedy.There is something incredibly sweet and beautiful in this simple storyline which, at first sight, might seem conventional and stereotypical with regards to romantic comedy. But the way Resnais builds dramaturgy is anything but conventional; as we move from brief scene to another and observe the situations where the characters come across with each other. The themes of the film are common for the director - intimacy, loneliness, disappointment and getting old, but new are the postmodern criticism for the mass culture of television, and a superior way of dealing with the tragicomic fantasies of his characters.Coeurs features three of Resnais' standard actors (Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier and Pierre Arditi) but new-comers in the world of Alain Resnais are an Italian actress Laura Morante and a French woman Isabelle Carré. Dussollier plays a bitter real-estate agent Thierry who has a dynamic, fundamental Christian colleague Charlotte (Sabine Azéma). Lionel (Pierre Arditi) is a slightly frustrated bartender who listens to the worries of Dan (Lambert Wilson) whose relationship isn't going so well with Nicole (Laura Morante) who tries to find a perfect home for her and Dan. Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) is Thierry's sister who desperately tries to find a date, and eventually becomes acquainted with Dan.The film has six protagonists and it wraps around certain threads of blind chance that seem to pull the characters together. It's a film about six people who come across with each other without really meeting or knowing each other. Each scene features a situation between two characters and we are quickly thrown from one situation to another but still never lose our track of what is going on. I think Resnais has found new emotional scales in Coeurs, which he didn't have before in his political films (1960's) nor in his "philosophical" films (1980's). The viewer actually cares, and has sympathy for the characters portrayed - which is too rare these days. I love, and prefer, the earlier films by Resnais so I mean no disrespect for them. This elegant story about six people remind the viewer of Resnais' classic Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and a bunch of other films by him, for example, Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) - where there is a certain ensemble of protagonists.Coeurs is a very Resnaisian film in all its histrionics. The film is entirely filmed in a setting that is clearly a studio. For instance, there are no roofs which is shown to the viewer in bird perspective shots. In the real-estate office there are movable glass walls, and we see that the characters don't notice it, but the camera shows it to us - fiction knows that it's fiction, the movie admits that it is only a movie. Strong pastel shades also characterize Coeurs - pink, orange and white walls, and lights.The characters make different interpretations of the same theme of sad melancholy life and the inability of man to see. The span of these themes is incredibly wide; from tragic (Lionel and his cruel father) to pathetic (Thierry and Gaëlle). Snow is the most surreal, Resnaisian, element of the film. Throughout the film it snows - everywhere. Resnais had already used snow flakes in L'Amour a Mort where he wanted to tell about life, death and hereafter. But in Coeurs the snow represents a wintry state of mind and the benumbed emotional lives of the characters.

Claudio Carvalho In a snowing Paris, six lonely dwellers have their lives entwined while seeking for love: Nicole (Laura Morante) is looking for a three bedroom apartment to move with her fiancé Dan (Lambert Wilson), who is unemployed and has drinking problem. Her middle-aged real estate agent Thierry (André Dussollier) lives with his younger sister Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) that tells him that party with her girlfriends every night. However Gaëlle indeed spends her nights alone in cafeterias waiting for blind dates that never appear for the encounter. Thierry's colleague is the pious and repressed Charlotte (Sabine Azéma) that loans a videotape with a musical religious show to him. But in the end, Thierry sees her in an erotic dance and he believes she is sending a sign for to him. Charlotte is nursing during the nights the aggressive and nasty father of the bartender Lionel (Pierre Arditi) that attends Dan every night in his bar."Coeurs" is an overrated and pointless tale of loneliness. The cold and snowing Paris is a kind of metaphor to the frustration in the relationship of the uptight characters that are afraid to deliver themselves to their passions. However the hype surrounding this movie increased my disappointment with the melancholic story. The characters are charismatic and likable and it is easy to the viewer to sympathize with them. Nevertheless the gorgeous Isabelle Carré is miscast in the role Gaëlle, since she is younger and younger than her brother and she is so beautiful that I can not understand how she does not succeed in her blind dates. There are good dialogs but the conclusion is too open and frustrating for a 120 minutes running time feature that gives the sensation of "so what?" to the viewer. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Medos Privados em Lugares Públicos" ("Private Fears in Public Spaces")

ametaphysicalshark There are several reasons why I chose "Coeurs" as the first Alain Resnais film I would see, chief among them that it seemed interesting and was one of his more acclaimed recent films (and I didn't want to start with films of his that were probably influenced very heavily by the 'Nouveau Roman' writers he worked with, including obviously Alain Robbe-Grillet on "Last Year at Marienbad" and Marguerite Duras on "Hiroshima mon amour"). Also, I find myself very interested in the works of artists who have lived longer than most of us will but are still working, as there is frequently a sort of experience and wisdom there which fascinates me. Also, it was pointed out to me by more than one person that a screenplay I had written with a friend (before either of us had seen or even heard of "Coeurs") was conceptually similar and, according to the one person who had read it, had some plot similarities too. Naturally I wanted to see it for myself.Ultimately, aside from the format which is quite similar in its moving frequently between different groups of characters for relatively short scenes, there was only one striking similarity which I could detect: in both screenplays two characters go on a blind date using fake names. Other than that, my approach and thought process was almost entirely dissimilar to Resnais', and naturally, although I'd love to say otherwise, it is his which is more interesting. I call it Resnais' approach, but the film is based on an English play and translated/adapted by Jean-Michel Ribes, so due credit to them as well obviously. Still, I was impressed, after hearing from more than one person about Resnais being a generally unintellectual, commercial film-maker, with not only the film's formally dazzling structure, look, and editing, but with the impressive restraint shown at every step. There's no showboating here, and Resnais does absolutely nothing with the film that is not important somehow to the story and characters. His constant use of partitions, the emphasized staginess of the film (though not the acting), as well as the dissolves linking each scene to the next are all crucial to the thematic content of the film.I initially met the film with some resistance. Some of the humor was too cute, and it felt like light fluff to me initially. However, much like numerous other films, "Coeurs" eventually came together, making the whole experience worthwhile. Ultimately the only things which truly bothered me were some intrusive clichés, all of which were linked directly to the character Charlotte, who really singlehandedly keeps the film from reaching true greatness. Any scenes with her feel like a waste compared to the dazzling scenes with the other characters. Well, to be fair, not every scene: the stuff with Lionel is quite strong (but certainly not the nonsense with his father, which isn't funny nor dramatically strong). When you have a mosaic-like structure of this sort, it's natural that some parts will be less interesting (and it's up to the individual which parts are less interesting), but my personal reaction to Charlotte and her relationship with Thierry was not even mild amusement, but a severe disinterest. The film is oddly distant, surely to emphasize the loneliness of these characters, but it's also wonderfully warm most of the time, and most of the characters are extremely well-drawn. Then you have a caricature who is never truly explored to significantly lessen the quality of the film. It's just plain disappointing.A very interesting film, certainly a formally excellent one, but I was disappointed in the lesser sections of it. Still, it gets a strong recommendation from me, due to Resnais' direction, thanks to the truly superb acting, and, obviously, the parts of the film (which is the majority of it) which didn't get on my nerves. It's just frustrating that it falls just short of greatness. Also, I think I'm in love with Gaelle now, not the actress, the character.