... shot on a soundstage, on sets that never pretend to be anything else. But it's a cinematic experience in every way, a delicate, melancholy and graceful film about shared space - literal and metaphorical - and universal longings.
It's about proximity and coincidence, crossed paths and overlapping relationships, but it's also about the distance between people, the gap between what they have and what they want. ...
People are constantly in search of something: whether it's a new flat or a new relationship, or something that they can't even quite define. They aren't always what they seem, and they don't always give their real names, and they don't always tell the truth to the people they are closest to. ...
Small revelations occur but don't always clarify things; sometimes, they create further problems or indecisions or disappointments.
Coeurs could appear slight in its carefully calibrated combination of warmth and chill, its formal grace and apparent simplicity, its exploration of confined spaces and confined lives - but its transparency and ease are misleading. It's a film unafraid of uncertainty or sadness; to the very last moment it feels not only assured and deft, but also mysterious and unresolved.
I don't think I've ever read a review which has more effectively enticed me to watch a film than Philippa Hawker's of Coeurs, from which all of the above is taken; to me, everything in that review suggested that Coeurs would be exactly the kind of film I like, not least in the way that much of it could literally have come word for word from my own notes towards API.
The film itself, though, didn't live up to those hopes (well, expectations). It's obvious that the people who made it know what they're doing - the film is impeccably put together, every scene carefully framed and subdivided, every line of dialogue well weighted and pregnant with multiple meanings, every interaction balancing and adding to the whole, and overlaid by a motif of snow which goes a long way to tying it all together, and yet -- . And yet -- it's very human for all of its chill, and yet -- it doesn't quite breathe, it doesn't shiver and resonate...somewhere, amidst the elegant subtleties of Coeurs, the true heart of the film is submerged. It's pretty fine, but it could have been so much more.
