Direction: Abdellatif Kechiche
Country: France
On the heels of the polemic, hedonistic Mektoub My Love: Intermezzo (2019)—which included a 13-minute unsimulated oral sex scene—Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due marks the third installment in the trilogy by controversial Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche (Blue is the Warmest Color, 2013). Despite showing flashes of potential, the film grows increasingly uneven as it progresses, relying heavily on the tension generated by carefully staged situations where ideas abound but meaningful resolution remains elusive. It all leads to an incomplete, unsatisfying finale.
Loosely adapted from the novel La Blessure, la vraie by François Bégaudeau, the story follows Amin (Shaïn Boumedine), a shy young man who returns to Sète after abandoning his medical studies in Paris. Aspiring to become a screenwriter and filmmaker, he finds an unexpected opportunity when celebrated yet emotionally vulnerable American actress Jessica Patterson (Jessica Pennington) arrives in town with her producer husband, Jack (Andre Jacobs). Running parallel to this narrative is the predicament of his best friend Ophélie (Ophélie Bau), who works on her parents’ farm and is preparing to marry her fiancé while secretly planning an abortion in Paris after becoming pregnant with her lover’s child.
Every shot breathes disenchantment, generating more friction through the raw immediacy of its images than through the narrative itself, which often feels slight and inconsequential. Excessively unconcerned with pursuing a coherent dramatic trajectory and overly dependent on the performances of its cast, the film occasionally brushes against genuine emotional truth only to let it dissipate in the following scene. There are moments that are both ludicrous and shocking, along with bursts of heightened emotion in a drama that swells to irrational proportions without offering much illumination.
Co-written by Kechiche and his partner, screenwriter-editor Ghalya Lacroix, Mektoub My Love: Canto Due is not unwatchable—merely trivial.
