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Love, sex and family values all a tangle in 'My Shortest Love Affair'
film review
Emerging out of the awkwardly quotidian flow of "My Shortest Love Affair" are two human lives in transformation. They are marvelously rendered, fully realized personalities embedded in a murky social milieu, blundering through a bad relationship that doesn't make any sense at all, so deeply adrift in their own subjectivity that even their moments of revelation are more dreamlike than clarifying.
Which is, in fact, rather a lot like real life - though whether it makes for a good movie will depend on your appetite for stream-of-consciousness plot arcs full of subtly implied art-house narrative symbolism.
As plots go, it's intriguing enough (and superficially in the vein of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset"): Two formerly youthful lovers have an apparently chance encounter 20 years later in Paris, and spend an evening catching up over wine. Before long they end up back in the sack - and promptly thereafter she is on the couch, pregnant, Skyping with her newold lover as they make plans for their next reunion and a new life together as parents.
Luisa - played convincingly by writerdirector Karin Albou - is a moody, literate, swooningly gorgeous Parisienne stuck in an unfulfilling career involving manuscripts and an elegantly condescending boss. She lives in a cozy apartment with her cat, and the two poles of her life - the workaday...