The Names of Love (2010)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Thanks for the memories!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I think this part of the official IMDb page sums everything up:Trivia While writing the script, Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi didn't have a full story, but rather sixty pages of situations stemming from the idea of a girl who sleeps with her political opponents.It shows. The movie makes you laugh sometimes but we have seen the Manic Pixie Dream Girl so many times that it isn't charming anymore. It's a step away from being annoying.The worst part of the movie is how everything solves rather quickly and there are so many loose ends. You will have a good time but it is not at all the masterpiece some commenters here argue it is.

Interesting slant.He's half Jewish, half French, has a terribly common name that belies his heritage.She's half Arabic, half French, has a very unique name that belies her heritage.Neither recognizes their foreign culture or religion; both identify heavily with French politics and culture. He is not seen as Jewish, she is not seen as Arabic, so they fit easily into French society, yet both had grandparents who were treated very badly by French authorities.He is twice her age and refuses her initial advances. She's excited by the prospect of becoming a Jewish/Arab couple, noting that this could only happen in France (thus making them very French).Their parents are deeply entrenched on opposite sides of the political spectrum. His French father spent his career in nuclear power while his mother was taught to deny her Jewish heritage. Her French mother is a staunch left-wing activist and her father is an Algerian-born people-pleaser. Their first dinner party together with at first two, then all three couples is true dark comedy.

I just saw this film and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's difficult to create a sexy laugh-out-loud comedy with quirky characters who fall in love that also intelligently and subtly considers complicated political differences on volatile subjects such as Jews, Arabs, Muslims, immigration, animal cruelty, bird flu, sexual abuse, fascists, and the Holocaust. I know it sounds like a bizarre combination but once you see the film, you will understand and appreciate the pleasure of it. It's quite an achievement that the filmmakers were able to maintain the hilarity and high level of political discourse all the way through while adding poignant elements to the story as well. Bravo to all involved, I was quite impressed.The only other film I can think of that can be compared to this is the Billy Wilder film One, Two, Three that's set in Berlin during the Cold War and has a capitalist and a communist falling in love with the help of the girl's reluctant guardian, a Coca Cola executive who pretends the communist is the son of an Old World aristocrat so the girl's parents don't freak out.But the Wilder film is more of a broad farce and doesn't have any poignancy to it. The Names of Love is much sweeter and more authentic in a real life way, which is more difficult to do well.

(Minor spoilers.) The premise of this movie is a romance between a self-proclaimed left-wing "political whore" and a (left-leaning, but not overtly political) veterinarian. Both are the children of a native French citizen and a member of a historically maligned group (Baya is half-Algerian, Arthur half-Jewish). But instead of engaging in some awful, weepy remembrance tearjerker, this movie gives its audience some credit and handles the expected poignance with humor and aplomb. Yes, the characters have secrets and conflicts which they've circumvented throughout their lives, but the specifics are irrelevant and--appropriately--elided. Rather, this is an attempt to examine how people deal with their heritage and personal lives while trying to reconcile their reactions with their beliefs--and what they feel their beliefs _ought_ to be.Moreover, while the full complexity of the characters' struggles is shown, it is always with a subtlety that keeps the movie grounded. The conversion of ancestral suffering into a cachet, to be readily exploited for the social needs of youth; the feelings of inadequacy in the presence of our parents, whose enormous ordeals seem to render our own difficulties trivial; the mental prisons we build for ourselves in order to establish emotional security; all of these intricate webs of social determinants and individual aspirations are depicted with just the right balance of sympathy and objectivity.So there is actual substance here. But what is truly remarkable is that Leclerc's use of po-mo tropes (like protagonists directly addressing the camera or characters interacting with their former selves) never feels stilted or laborious, and in fact entails a seamless fusion of form and content.