Text by Gabriele Noia
Translation by Bianca Baroni
Photo by Giacomo Cosua
The melodrama by Jacquoit should be a pure one: a man and a woman caught in a sentimental passion that can’t be actualized due to external obstacles. The world and its norms, but the fate too, join the most powerful force in nature to create an obvious human disaster filled with wasted life and broken families.
The plot is the right one to reach this goal: a man and a woman meet by chance, something very sweet arises bewteen them after a single long night spent walking around until dawn. They don’t have mobile phones, they don’t know each other’s names but they plan a date to which one of the two won’t be able to go due to reasons that are beyond their will.
Looking for her, he will wander around her city and will meet, fall in love with and then marry her sister, without knowing who she is. I let you imagine how desperate this situation can turn out to be, in Christmas time.
This twist, in the style of The Woman Next Door (there’s a passion in my past that keeps on infesting my present and I can’t live anymore like I was used to) is here expanded with great tension but few passion. Jacquoit seems to refuse the passionate nature of melodrama and among all of the turmoils that are shown, what is injected is the phisical pain, the heart-breaking and the shouts. With a finale that is rather brave than successful, 3 Coeurs is not a real melodrama: it foresees a tragedy but in the fullness of the time in which it should make us shed a tear, it loses its way: it prefers a lofty tone and pretending to be an art film, it gets away from it.
What a shame. A strange beginning, a particular soundrack and the out of time (but exactly right) role of the two sisters’ mother (Catherine Deneuve) could have given his own flavour to the story, in the first minutest, since it seems to be inspired by Before Sunset and it looks like a back in love kind of thing in Truffaut style. Insted, it comes out to be a mediocre movie, that was about to win the game but couldn’t make it.
