If one were to guess the plot of French writer/director Benoît Jacquot’s “3 Hearts” from the first scene, one would think from the dialogue and the moody, atmospheric music that it was a thriller following a man as he preys on the women he meets in the streets.
Upon further observation, one would quickly come to wish that this was the plot, because, otherwise, this first scene is not a very convincing introduction for our protagonist. Marc (Benoît Poelvoorde) has missed his train home, so he asks Sylvie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a passerby on the street, where the closest hotel is. He then continues to talk to her, prying into her life, asking odd questions and eventually describing himself as someone who “really like[s] women.” The interaction provokes a reaction more along the lines of discomfort than of romantic interest.
But something about Marc must be attractive to Sylvie (the influence of the screenwriter’s pen, perhaps), because she promises to meet up with him in Paris that Friday. But their rendezvous falls apart when Marc gets caught up in a (fairly racist) meeting at work, then delayed by symptoms of a heart condition triggered by stress on the way to meet her (this heart condition acts as a sympathy card for Marc’s otherwise mediocre character).
This missed connection is the deciding factor for Sylvie—she had been debating moving to America with her current partner and finally decides to go. Sylvie’s sister, Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni), to whom she is very close, becomes distraught by Sylvie’s departure and has a chance run-in with—you guessed it—Marc, who promises to help her with some tax mistakes that her sister had left behind at the family business (he is a tax inspector).
Marc and Sophie hit it off and fall in love (Marc lives up to the standard he’s set for himself of really liking women, and Sophie abruptly breaks it off with her current partner), and life carries on with nary a concern for Marc. His heart condition magically clears up once he’s removed the stress of landing a lady, and he does not realize the connection between the women until after the couple is engaged.
Instead of discussing the odd circumstance with his future wife, Marc bottles the information up—even after the wedding, when he and Sylvie finally meet again. And then, four years later, after he and Sophie have had a child together, Sylvie returns to France, and the two begin an affair behind her sister’s back, initiating the true conflict of the plot more than halfway through the film.
There is no light way of putting this: Everything about this film oozes chauvinistic fodder. Marc is a romanticized womanizer, winning two women’s hearts for no reason other than being the protagonist. The main characters behave in a way that goes beyond irrationality, which would be understandable if the purpose were to reveal human nature at its most selfish. But the film fancies itself a story about star-crossed lovers, asking its audience to submit to one implausible plot point after another (for example, pictures of Sylvie cover the walls of their mother’s house, and Sophie frequently Skypes her, but Marc somehow still never sees her face).
The actors do their best to salvage this mangled story, and the cinematography acts as a quiet relief, but Jacquot’s direction and writing have woefully come up short. “3 Hearts” is now playing at the Midtown Cinema.
Midtown Cinema
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