The Nouvelle Vague never really ended for Philippe Garrel. Here we are in 2018, and the French auteur is still making films that drift around Paris like it’s 1964. Shot in shimmering black-and-white, with characters obsessively pontificating about love, sex and little else, Garrel’s style suggests a hollow, wafty New Wave pastiche, but there’s spiky emotional depth to his latest tale of infidelity.
Following Jealousy and In The Shadow Of Women, Lover For A Day completes Garrel’s informal trilogy of deceit and desire. Admittedly, laughs are on the light side, but the film’s set-up is, nonetheless, the stuff of classic French farce. Ditched by her boyfriend, a daughter moves back in with her lecturer dad, discovers he’s having an affair with one of his students, and the three form a rogue family unit in his shabby apartment – a kind of platonic ménage à trois. Rivals at first, the two young women slowly form an unlikely, sisterly bond.
Although events circle around Eric Caravaca’s world-weary professor, the film’s focus is vigorously feminine, its two heroines representing opposing forces of the female psyche. The callow, cautious Jeanne pines for love, determined to seduce her ex-boyfriend. The promiscuous Ariane, on the other hand, is an unstable flirt lured by forbidden thrills, be it modelling for a porn mag or leaping into one-night stands behind Caravaca’s back. Esther Garrel, daughter of director Philippe, delivers a brittle turn as the bruised Jeanne but it’s newcomer Louise Chevillotte who emerges as the film’s lifeforce – an anarchic "female Don Juan" whose impulsive betrayals have devastating consequences for the trio.
Running for a succinct 76 minutes, Lover For A Day isn’t short on incident – in fact, there are several plot shifts that threaten to tip into volatile melodrama, but Caravaca’s Gilles is too wry and relaxed for that to happen. The pleasure of Lover For A Day lies in watching lives being lived; bare, open, aggrieved and unjudged. That luminous monochrome cinematography is undoubtedly nostalgic, but the characters within it are full-colour, 21st century and utterly alive. Their fates ripple through the mind long after the credits have rolled.