‘Love Lessons’ Review: Fabrice Luchini in Seductive French Fluff

If French writer-director Martin Provost were the head of a fashion brand, it would be the kind of house that turns out exceptionally well-made, classically designed upper-mid-market gear for an older clientele who know what they like and don’t want any silly logos or bizarre color combinations. It’s chic, if just a touch safe, outfits that maybe nod cursorily toward contemporary silhouettes and trends but won’t look dated in five years’ time.

Indeed, his latest, Love Lessons, is like a cinematic look book for Soeur or Sézane, the major-name female cast (including Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni and Carole Bouquet) dressed in elegant linen frocks and jaunty, faintly maritime separates that suit the seaside vibe of Dieppe, in Normandy, where the story takes place. If it were a perfume, it would smell of ozone, salt and rosemary. What the story is actually about almost doesn’t matter — just enjoy the quiet luxury of it all, with the ever-endearing Fabrice Luchini in the lead doing yet another bumbling, bourgeois gentleman of a certain age.

If you really must know what the plot is, then suffice to say it’s a dating movie with senior citizens, a sex comedy for the post-menopausal set but one where we never see any actual sex. Also, there’s no mention of needing Viagra or lubricant. But who needs such fripperies when you have the aphrodisiacs of beautiful property, elegant clothes and a steady stream of amorous literary quotations in such abundance?

Luchini plays Emile, a beloved high-school French teacher whom we first meet giving his very last class. His retirement starts the moment the school bell rings. Naturally, his lesson on Jean de La Fontaine’s fable about “Love and Folly” will be prescient of events to follow. When Emile gets home, he finds a letter from his wife of many years, Barbara (whom we never meet), who has left him for some guy with a camper van.

Emile is unsurprisingly upset, but not exactly crushed. The last question a student asked him was whether he still loves his wife, but Emile never answered as the bell went off. His sister Perrine (Helene Alexandridis), who looks after their aged mother (Evelyne Istria) in a beautiful cliffside house that may or may not be in danger of falling into the sea (metaphor alert), is not surprised Barbara skedaddled. She and Emile had little in common, and he really never got over his first love as a teen, Lala.

Speaking of Lala, it just so happens she has finally returned to Dieppe after years away working as a flight attendant, and although she’s in her 60s she’s played by Devos (star of Provost’s 2013 hit Violette) so she’s still a knockout. Provost playfully choreographs the action so that she and Emile keep missing each other by mere meters as they circumambulate around Dieppe. Lala is there winding down the affairs of her late father, while Emile is checking out whether he likes bathing in the sea with a gaggle of locals the same age, for example, or having a fun fling with animal-rights activist Nadege (Bouquet, rocking a head of tidy cornrows that somehow neither looks daft nor too culturally inappropriate for a white lady).

Because of the rule of threes, there’s one more potential love object in the mix for Emile to consider: Audrey (Mastroianni), a woman who just found out her husband has been having an affair. Distraught, she’s left him and her two teenage sons to be alone in Dieppe, but she accidentally runs into Emile while he’s putting books in the free book box on the road. His recommendation that she read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (good choice) helps her to discover a love of literature (less convincing) and then she takes a job working as a housekeeper at his mother’s place. Soon, she and Emile find themselves attracted to each other, but then he meets Lala again and that passion flares up once more.

Viewers well versed in the ways of romantic fiction won’t be that surprised by how this little pas de quatre works out as Emile dithers and deliberates over each woman’s charms. Meanwhile, they work out their own assessments of what they want in life and the whole thing comes to a satisfying, reassuringly muted conclusion. Throughout, the film will cut to one of Emile’s former students as they recite a poem or a chunk of prose straight to camera, works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Yourcenar or Arthur Rimbaud, among others. Presumably the display is meant to reassure viewers that the good literary taste of their generation will survive into the next, but it feels a bit more like a recital put on for the grandparents by kids bribed by the elders. But like so much else here, it’s all about posing and pretend, not actual substance.