During the scintillating opening moments of “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno” a young man peers through a window at a couple having gorgeous, abandoned sex, described in tactile, fleshy images of the beautiful young woman’s tousled hair, panting mouth, fuzzy pudenda, dimpled thighs and sweet folds of puppyish flab. It’s an extraordinarily real, sexy sex scene, immediately reminding us of the thrillingly immersive filmmaking of which Abdellatif Kechiche is capable. And in its focus on her flesh and her face, it is a gauntlet thrown down by a filmmaker who has often been criticized for the maleness of his gaze, most recently that of his masterful Palme d’Or winner “Blue is the Warmest Color.” But while ‘Mektoub’ will see him offer no apology for his fixation with the female form (in fact he’ll double down on it as never before, especially that quadrant south of the waist and north of the knees) it lacks anything like the empathy and humane connectivity of ‘Blue.’ And without a strong story, or particularly interesting protagonist the drama feels even longer than its already wildly overlong 186 minutes. While studded with moments of power and often radiant with the shining, supple loveliness of its cast, this ostensibly energetic dip into the fountain of youth that is a Mediterranean beachside summer could make even the best-disposed viewer feel tired and creaky and ancient.
It is August 1994, and the young voyeur at the window — our handsome but sadly blank-slate hero — is Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), who is visiting his coastal village hometown from Paris where he has abandoned med school to write a sci-fi screenplay about a man who falls in love with a robot woman. This would be a handy gotcha for the “Kechiche is a misogynist” crew were it not for the fact that here, the women are anything but robots and while their bodies, especially their asses, are a source of Nelly-video-levels of fetishism for Marco Graziaplena‘s camera, there is an unapologetic, expressive joy in their ownership and exhibition of them — for the camera, for men, for each other and for themselves.
The young woman on whom Amin is spying is Ophélie (the film’s stunning breakout star, Ophélie Bau), whose soldier fiancé is far away, stationed on an aircraft carrier, while she’s at home getting jiggy with Amin’s cousin Tony (Salim Kechiouche), himself quite the player around town. If their four-year affair is a secret, as Ophélie likes to believe, it is an open one: everyone from Amin’s mother Dede (a wonderful Delinda Kechiche, bringing a grounding warmth to all of her scenes) to Tony’s new squeeze Charlotte (Alexa Chardard) a student on vacation with her dancer friend Celine (Lou Luttiau), suspects that they are not just the friends they pretend to be. And of course, terminally friendzoned Amin knows it best of all, and despite clearly carrying a mile-high torch for the exuberantly sexual alpha-female Ophélie, he plays confidante for her rather vacuous fidelity issues.
The days and nights of these few weeks in the life of Amin, apparently the most sensitive and least hedonistic of his group of friends and relatives, are gathered around the beach, the local bar and nightclub scene, and the Tunisian restaurant owned and run by his and Tony’s family. They swim, eat, get drunk, dance, pair off in ever-shifting permutations, hook up, fall out and then go swimming again — rinse and repeat. No real philosophy or central idea emerges, and matters are only confused further by the film’s polyglottal title: “Mektoub” means “destiny” or “it is written” in Arabic; “Canto Uno” is Italian and seems to refer directly to Dante‘s Divine Comedy, but the film feels so impressionistic and ephemeral that there is little to warrant such grandiose classical allusion, nor to earn the quotes from the Qu’ran and the Gospel of St John that flash up at the start.
But amid all the dionysian activity, this parade of photogenic faces giggling, flirting, throwing shade and whispering secrets into one another’s ears, there are moments of calm, which are often the film’s most powerful scenes. Ophélie’s family run a sheep dairy farm, and her practised way with the animals — affixing pumps to their udders, explaining the lambing process to Amin — lets us know that there is more to her than her manipulative sexual confidence, her “angelic” J-Lo face and generous, callipygian derriere. One quiet scene as Amin, also an avid photographer, waits all day in a pen full of pregnant sheep to catch the moment of birth on camera, is a thoughtful and provocative respite from all the noise. At another juncture, he watches a Soviet war movie before being shooed out into the sunshine by Dede: the black-and-white soldiers grinning in death onscreen provide a startling, if mysterious contrast to all the shallow life outside.
Mostly though, and to oddly deadening effect, the film follows bouncy, cacophonous scene after bouncy cacophonous scene, as the attractive, beachy-waved, skimpily clad female cast twerk hard and play hard (the film is an ode to undercheek), soundtracked to clashing cuts from opera to Neil Diamond to classical music to Scatman John, and culminating in a drunken nightclub bacchanal that seems to defy the laws of physics to become longer than the film it’s in.
There is no doubt we’re in the Kechiche Cinematic Universe: ‘Mektoub’ refers not only to ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ in its lesbian moments and sensually messy spaghetti-eating, but to the dancing scene and couscous fixation of “The Secret of the Grain,” as well as to the almost carnivorous body-exploitation of “Black Venus.” But perhaps the film it refers to most is 2003’s “Games of Love and Chance“: These characters are older and more sexually experienced but the level of their interpersonal interaction has not moved on much from the high-school kids of Kechiche’s sophomore breakout, and they seem equally uninterested in the world outside their little circle of self-involved dramatics. Aside from that arrestingly vivid opening, and flashes of connection in the eating of a fig or the bleating of a newborn lamb, ‘Mektoub’ titillates without ever delivering the up-to-your-eyes immersion that the filmmaker’s best work deals in, and after three long hours, nobody’s changed, nobody’s learned anything and no one’s grown any older, except the audience. [B-/C+]
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