Love Like Poison

The Film Festival has a music section which could have included Love Like Poison. For much of the film it is not clear what Love Like Poison is about, but there is beautiful singing to enjoy while you are trying to figure it out. The church figures big in Anna's life so we get the congregation singing like a professional choir with and without the organ. We also get an altar boy wooing Anna with a love song.

First-time director Katell Quillévéré likes to make her audience work by constructing a film of short disconnected sequences, that we have to make sense of. Anna is home from boarding school and preparing for confirmation. Her father has left home for another woman, leaving her mother distraught. Her local friend is leaving the village, so she finds herself spending time with three very different people: an earnest young priest, her jazz record playing bedridden grandfather and the infatuated altar boy.

Once you get used to the disconnected sequences and the aimless lack of story telling you can relax and enjoy this coming-of-age film which doesn't shrink from an octogenarian sex drive and a mother's jealousy of her teenage daughter's body. There is also the bonus of nice music and rural France.

Ian's rating 3/5