Love Me If You Dare (2003)

Certainly I’m no expert on the matter of foreign films, I watch them quite rarely and well, I’m no Bonjour Tristesse but I do stumble on some when I get the courage. Love Me If You Dare was a French movie I watched about a month ago and the reason I’m getting to this now, is because I just remembered its ending the other day. Before that, I had every attention to skip this movie review completely, because I found it impossible to review up to the point where I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Love Me If You Dare is a good example of a French movie: it has such a weird and unrealistic ending to it that I simply opened my mouth in disbelief and put the idea of reviewing it aside. I’m not going to spoil it because it would take me a lot of time to explain it all and just mentioning the end alone is simply impossible but there is something this movie ended up doing that I can tell you. Like so many good movies, odd or not, widely known or appreciated in smaller communities, Love Me If You Dare came into my life and with its memorable story it has never left me!

So this post is not much of a review but a praise to Yann Samuell’s debut, writer and director of this movie, who created a plot outside the human logic and made it into a love story which has imbedded itself into my brain. Two people came together at a young age and started to play a game which made sense when they were children, and even in their early teenage years but then it became much more than just a game. It wasn’t meant to be logical, I’m pretty sure it was a movie filled with metaphors and symbolic meaning, but I couldn’t really accept it in at the time. I did enjoy its cinematography which was gorgeous.

Do I understand the movie now, after a month of wondering over the matters of love and life and a game, probably not but what I do know now is the fact that some movies are just so complex that you will never understand them. Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard portray these two main characters with no doubt and regret, as they fall in and out of love with each other while playing the game that tears them apart and brings them back together. But I will never understand their characters and I wonder if the actors themselves knew, if the writer and the director knew… Maybe it’s a love thing, something I don’t quite understand but I tend to think it’s mostly a French thing – making movies with little quirks and twists because life is supposed to be odd and weird and never fully realistic.

Love Me If You Dare is definitely no Amelié but it sure does a great job of getting to you when you least expect it.. even weeks after you finish watching the movie, you see something that reminds you of it, and you start to wonder if they are still there where the movie left them. Isn’t that what a good movie is set out to do? Make you wonder if that little totem stopped turning or if what you saw was actually true and not a dream. Either way, Love Me If You Dare was certainly an experience.

Images from Rotten Tomatoes.

PS: The original title in French is Jeux d’enfants in case anyone was wondering. Also, French is probably the most appealing language to me, the sound is just magnificent.