He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
(A la folie…pas du tout)
directed by Laetitia Colombani (2003)
French w/ English subtitles

by Nicholas Nocketback

Like “You’ve Got Mail” If “You’ve Got Mail” Was Written By Irvine Welsh

A charming film for the sick and twisted lover in all of us. If your timidity has prevented you from renting a foreign film in the past, this is the one that’ll break those silly little chains that bind. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is how Amelie’s quest for love would’ve ended in the real world.
Audrey Tautou plays Angelique, an art student who falls for Loic (Samuel Le Bihan), a cardiologist. And, as we know from life, the sciences and the arts are always at odds in the grand scheme of things. Cut to the opening scene, an elfin Tautou selecting a perfect single rose to be delivered to her amor. It looks to be a delightful romantic comedy from the jump, but French film, as we know, is anything but simple and sweet…even chocolate makes you sick if you eat too much.
Colombani wraps this vivid narrative around the disturbing center which becomes a quest in deciphering who’s really screwing whom (figuratively as well as literally). If you’ve ever loved someone so much that everything else became muted and friends became peripheral and obtuse, while the one true thing was your infatuation, this is your flick. We all know someone who has crossed the line between lover and stalker—maybe it was us, but this film highlights how one mixed signal can lead to a five car pile up.
This is one of those films that reexamines itself in the middle—giving you two perspectives (he says, she says)—and eventually irons out the wrinkles in the final segment, like when you watched Pulp Fiction for the first time. He Loves Me is the perfect first date film: if your date is ugly, you can look at Audrey Tautou. If your date happens to be unremarkable and you find it going nowhere and would rather drink with your boys, you can lean in real close after the final credits; look her in the eye and whisper, “that’s how I feel about you.”