Review of He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not (2002) by Caleb M — 03 Feb 2011

First, let me say, I love, Love, LOVE the idea of casting Audrey Tautou against type. She would be mesmerizing as a femme fatale or just flat out evil bitch. That said, her character doesn't work well in HE LOVES ME, HE LOVES ME NOT. In fact, not much at all works in this convoluted thriller.

You'd be forgiven to think this film was a romantic comedy. After all, doesn't the ad suggest as whimsical farce a la Four Weddings and A Funeral? Well, even if you weren't expecting a light romance, you would find this film a strange, if not entirely uninteresting mess.

Part of the problem lies in the structure: a third of the film is told from Tautou's perspective, a third from Samuel Le Bihan's, the rest tries to combine the two. What starts out as a light romance turns into a fairly standard stalker picture. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that stalkers, well, they're pretty boring to watch. Unless you're the stalker (or you're in a film by Brian DePalma), where's the fun in watching you stalk somebody? What HE LOVES ME, HE LOVES ME NOT turns into is a fairly dull stalker picture. That's the rest of the film's problems: stalkers aren't scary or sexy. At least not in this film. You know who is stalking who, and after a while, it just becomes a matter of time until everything gets brought back to normal.

Tautou was cute enough to keep me watching (though her friend Sophie Guillemin is a stunning distraction, wish she had more screen time), but the film feels like it's script had been rewritten halfway through filming. Either that, or I watched some horrendous recut version intended for American audiences fresh of Amelie, though I doubt any recut could change a film's tone as drastically as this film does.

HE LOVES ME, HE LOVES ME NOT is weird. It isn't horrible (I watched it all the way through), but it's damn bad. If it weren't for the always charming (even when she's awkwardly stalking doctors) Tautou, this would be utterly worthless. So, unless you have a crush on Audrey Tautou which you know will never lead anywhere, don't bother with HE LOVES ME, HE LOVES ME NOT.