Trois Amies is a tender and funny story that invites the audience to reflect on love and friendship in the face of tragedy.
Director: Emmanuel Mouret
Genre: Drama
Run Time: 118′
Venice World Premiere: August 30, 2024
U.S. Release Date: TBA
U.K. Release Date: TBA
“Being alive also means worrying, feeling sad, feeling lonely,” was my favourite line from Trois Amies. At its best, the movie is an exploration of what being alive means, with all the feelings involved, both the positive ones of love and friendship and the more negative ones people tend to push away. Even when, like the protagonist of the film, we may want to avoid the worst ones, it is a powerful reminder that even sadness, pain, and tragedy are a part of being alive.
As the name suggests, Trois Amies follows the three titular best friends, who are the beating heart of this story: Joan (India Hair, of A Radiant Girl), Alice (Camille Cottin, of Stillwater), and Rebecca (Sara Forestier). At the beginning of the film, Joan is tormented by the fact that she is no longer in love with Victor (Vincent Macaigne, of Love Affairs) but struggles to come to terms with her feelings as they have a life and a daughter together. She confides in her friend Alice, who reassures her that she herself isn’t in love with her husband Eric (Grégoine Ludig) either. Unbeknownst to Alica, Eric is actually having an affair with Rebecca, who is growing more and more distant from her two friends.
With Trois Amies, director Emmanuel Mouret explores the many shapes and forms that love can take in our lives. While Alice and Joan seem to have constantly opposing and yet evolving approaches to love in their respective romantic relationship – asking each other whether they need to be in love with their partner or if that feeling fades over time – it is immediately clear that they are surrounded by love whether they like it or not. This goes far beyond the romantic relationships, as love manifests through the strong friendship between the three women as well as serendipitous and chance encounters with strangers. In this film, friendship and love entirely co-exist with the two constantly depending on each other in the lives of the protagonists.
The narrator is perhaps one of the most interesting elements of Trois Amies. The best lines in a well-written script come from his voiceover, with his powerful reflections on what love and life ultimately mean. While Victor may not be able to communicate with his loved ones as he would like, he can share the life lessons he is learning with us: the audience. In fact, his voiceover directly addresses the viewer, giving us all the context we may need to understand this movie and helping us move through it with equally funny and emotional moments. Unfortunately, towards the end of the film, his narration becomes pedantic and futile.
The way the story is told is also fascinating in Trois Amies, as the various plotlines often overlap and mirror each other in what starts to feel like an endless loop of similar encounters and circumstances. However, its narrative ultimately feels very messy. The various threads that the audience follows in this film are left too unexplored in order to give enough screen time to all of them. Their overlapping also feels too forced at times to be authentic to the story or the characters. With its constant repetitiveness in encounters, situations, and even shots and lines, the film ends up feeling too long and too slow.
Overall, Trois Amies is a powerful film reminding us that life and happiness can be found after tragedy, even if we may be scared of them. Its message and themes are very strong and will certainly resonate with many people in the audience. From a storyline point of view, the film is fairly strong with a beautifully written script and fascinating reflections on love, life, and death. However, its narrative also fails at times in terms of structure and editing, which definitely could have been tighter to help the repetitive and relaxed pace of the movie.
Trois Amies had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2024. Read our list of films to watch at the 2024 Venice Film Festival!
