Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'enfants)
December 2004 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Love Me If You Dare is a French movie subtitled in English that seems lost in translation. At least you’d think so when even Roger Ebert is baffled by it. Writer/director Yann Samuell’s plot follows a love affair begun when Julien (Thibault Verhaeghe) and Sophie (Josephine Lebas-Joly) are only eight. They bond because he is struggling with the knowledge of his mother’s cancer and she, a child of Polish immigrants, is scorned by her classmates. They begin a game of daring each other to perform outrageous acts of rebellion, trading between them a small canister, a gift from Julien’s mother. The one holding it dares the other to urinate on the principal’s floor, for example, or to yank the tablecloth from under a wedding cake. The game outlasts childhood, and the dares become dangerous and cruel.

Viewers are either outraged by this ambiguous relationship or generously forbearing. Time passes, and Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard, an electric twosome, replace the child actors. Louis Armstrong’s "La Vie en Rose" is one of several covers that become their romantic theme. But the erotic charge between them seems never to spark into romance.

The story is told by Julien’s voice-over, and we see only his perceptions and fantasies (both ecstatic and paranoid). Cinematographer Antoine Roch employs numerous techniques to express Julien’s interior world -- fast-forwards, aerial perspectives, odd angles, numerous fast cuts, digital effects -- perhaps best seen on the big screen. The colors in Julien’s fantasies are bright and primary or chalky pastel; distinctively different from the subtler palettes used elsewhere. Costumer Julie Maudeuch puts Marion Cotillard in vivid red dresses, usually to foreshadow something dangerous -- a disrupted wedding, for example, or a car crash. These dramatic shifts in palette and the constantly changing visual effects fit the eccentric love story and are accurately conveyed in the smart-looking DVD transfer. Sound throughout seemed crisp. There are no extra features on this DVD.

No wonder this film has proven controversial. How can you care about such crazy characters, or separate Julien’s fantasies from reality? The final scene is the answer: Sophie and Julien at 80 (Nathalie Nattier and Robert Willar) are spotty and wrinkly but incorrigible still, living in an old-folks’ home. The iconic canister has become, well, a canister, used for storing candy. As Zazie’s stylish "La Vie en Rose" comes up underneath, Sophie offers Julien a toffee, and he dares at last to say "I love you." Now what could be more romantic?

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