- Vincent Macaigne and Maud Wyler in 2 Autumns, 3 Winters
Romantic comedies about white, college-educated thirtysomethings are a dime a dozen, which is why I had fairly low expectations for 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, despite having read Michael Castelle’s laudatory write-up on CINE-FILE over the weekend. Yet this buoyant French indie, which plays again tonight at 6 PM and tomorrow at 8:30 PM at the Gene Siskel Film Center, has little of the smugness or complacency I’ve come to associate with the genre. In fact, one of its central themes is learning to accept disappointment as a basic fact of adult life—and this sense of resignation stands in marked opposition to the gentle surface tone, the conflict generating a steady nervous energy that makes the film’s 90 minutes seem to zip by.
Betbeder doesn’t present any of this stuff as heavy. His characters are privileged and know it—even when they directly address the camera and tell us about their anxieties, they do so in a modest, self-effacing way. Yet the low-key, conversational vibe doesn’t keep Betbeder from scoring some poignant insights. There’s an eloquence to his dialogue—Betbeder takes obvious pleasure in descriptive language, using it to compensate for his relatively simple imagery. The steady flow of ideas and narrative incidents makes 2 Autumns feel densely packed for a low-budget movie. Like his characters, Betbeder wants to make every observation count, to focus only on those fleeting impressions he might transform into the stuff of cinema. In Godard’s Masculine-Feminine, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s character famously talks about going to the movies in hopes of seeing the one he wanted to live in. Betbeder seems to have taken that sentiment as the starting point for 2 Autumns. He concludes, optimistically, that life is always cinematic if we allow it to be.
