Fragments of a Life Loved Film Review: Ex Stories

In Fragments of a Life Loved, director Chloé Barreau assembles her former lovers for post-mortems and new perspectives on romance.

Interspersed with these intimate windows into her life are interviews with those old flames – twelve of them – who speak candidly about their time with Barreau and how the memory of her lingers. One says she will always be a part of whatever time they have left. 

Barreau is not present for these interviews, and it shows; their candidness is remarkable. Old wounds resurface and private moments are laid bare, but what is most touching is everyone’s open-hearted sincerity. If Barreau means to construct a tapestry of unfiltered expressions of love with her film, then job done. Now middle-aged, most interviewees still express youthful notions of romance. This, despite their experiences with the director, which are described as deceitful and slippery. She is a habitual adulterer, caught up in spontaneous flights of fancy with each new lover she comes across. Many of them find a poetic beauty in Barreau’s lust for life – and for them. She is said to be in love with love itself. 

The audience’s detached point of view may categorise her behaviour in other ways. Lyrical monologues about passionate encounters rub up against our unemotional relationship with her. Her absence from the film allows other, more judgemental opinions to form, and her obvious selfishness is at war with the adoration from people who were swept up in her affection. Like Before Sunrise’s ambiguous ending – whose director, Richard Linklater, shares Fragments of a Life Loved’s approach to uninhibited reflections on life – these stories are passed to the viewer to interpret further, finding their own meaning in what happens between lovers. 

But what of the stories each ex has told themselves over the years? Some have clearly made peace with Barreau and think fondly of their dalliances. Some – like Anne, whose recollections are the most raw – still look exhausted. She shared an almost literary version of romance with Barreau, smoking, drinking coffee, and reading long novels aloud to each other. Having not spoken for 25 years, thinking about the relationship makes her feel drunk, and all the highs and lows that come with that. The memory of Barreau is like a poltergeist in Anne’s interview, but is something more precious to Marco, who is the only interviewee to cry when reading back a letter he sent to her. Their time together is a connection to his younger self, now gone. 

For Barreau, love is a way of punctuating her life, creating a web of memories. If it is true a person dies twice – once when they pass away, and again when the last person who remembers them dies too – then Barreau is so extremely alive. She exists in Fragments of a Life Loved in twelve different ways, delicately maintained within these shared experiences. Life for her is passionate, lustful, impulsive, with love as her north star, often at other people’s expense. For better or worse, she is still with her exes, a spectre that has imprinted on them forever. The past is considered to be more mysterious than the future by one ex, which speaks to the effects all of us have on one another in ways we can never fully understand. 

There is a curious self-indulgence inherent to the film’s premise which echoes Barreau’s younger days of prioritising her desires over the people she indulges in them with. Whatever anyone thinks of her – ex or audience – she emerges from Fragments of a Life Loved as a mighty figure, impacting people’s lives long after she’d disappeared from them. Perhaps a continuation rather than a culmination of her romantic documenting, the film effectively shows off the power she has had over the lives of others, which at times borders on the magical. Marina describes her as looking like an elf when they met, and was more intimidated by Barreau’s beauty than that of Rome. 

But the idea of gathering your old lovers to talk about you on film surely must take some confidence in the first place. It is because of that conviction in her own storytelling that Barreau has pulled off this heartfelt documentary. It is a mindful meditation on how we carry the memories of significant connections with us for the rest of our lives, and how wonderful and messy that can be. What could have felt invasive instead feels deeply human, universal, and absolutely romantic.

Fragments of a Life Loved will be screened at Bertha DocHouse on 20 July, 2024 as part of the third edition of the Cinecittà Italian Doc Season.