Michaël Dacheux | L'amour debout (Love Blooms) / 2018

discoveries about the self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isabelle Bourdon, Michaël Dacheux, and Emmanuelle Jacob (screenplay) Michaël Dacheux (director) L'amour debout (Love Blooms) / 2018

 

There are have been far too few and generally dismissive reviews of the 2018 French film, which I, watching it again the other night, quite enjoyed.

     Most certainly, the plot of the feature film from the very beginning is basically about rejection. Martin (Paul Debreil) has moved to Paris from his native Toulouse to attempt to reestablish a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Léa (Adèle Csech), who has evidently proceeded him from their provincial home to Paris several months or even years before he sheepishly turns up in search of something he imagines might still be there.

     But, in the meantime, she has become an informed tour guide, beginning in the first scene with what a found as a rather fatuous reports on the former Paris market place, Les Halles, tragically closed in 1973, now turned into a shopping and cultural center whose several architectural monstrosities she praises. To give her credit, however, she later takes a group of far more interesting tourists to see the various homes in which Paul Verlaine lived before meeting Arthur Rimbaud.

     The tour is a long one, and when she finally finishes, she attempts to explain to the still naïve boy that she has found a new life in Paris, and, despite their former love, has longer has any room in her heart for their childhood friendship.

    Fortunately, Martin has his brother and sister-in-law who are even willing to put him up in his own room. But with two children, a noisy and busy house, it is not the kind of place this true cinephile, who back in Toulouse sponsored a film series of his most beloved films which few students bothered to attend, might find peace, let along even imagine how he might proceed in making his own movie. He attempts to get a room in a cheap hotel, but finds so sympathy there either, who suggest that he get an apartment.

     Yet, he has no money. Fortunately, as he leaves the hotel he runs into another former student from Toulouse, Tristan ((Thibaut Destouches), a young and eager, also very handsome, now PhD student of science, who quickly invites him to share his small apartment, offering first the couch, but finally luring him to share his own bed. If this hints of sexual delights, drop your hopes for such a situation, since the sleep-walking young man, is still a virgin and seems to be fairly asexual, long before such an identification was ever discussed. Based on Freudian theory, where he argued that sleepwalking attempts to fulfill unconscious wishes, mostly, he argue, an “effort to return to a safe, comforting place from childhood,” modern psychoanalytic theory often describes it as the primitive urges of the Id and the restrictions of the Superego.

   As I childhood sleepwalker, who once donned my winter coat and attempted to return to the cold out-door weather of Iowa, I would argue it was, for me, mostly an attempt of escape from the normality of my life. Although I always returned to my bed, I was desperately trying to explain to myself that I needed to move off and away. It finally leaped in my conscious mind, and I did precisely that, insisting my father send me away to another country during my senior year of high school. I never came back as the same person who left, and I think to his last dying day, my father believes it was the result of my political, religious, and sexual rebellions. I would imagine that Tristian also was attempting to enter a world of which he was terrified, since he had for so long immersed himself in scientific thought. Even he admits that he admired Martin, when he was a younger student, for his resolve and tenacity of show films that no one seemed to wanted to watch.

     One of the most painful moments of this film is when Martin hears that his bedmate is a virgin, he sees it was an almost saintly condition, something with which Tristan can die in bliss. I think this is simple bullshit. To not have been able to put the body into living the experience sexual activity is almost unimaginable, something like abandoning one the most delightful pleasures and meaningful activities of one’s life. Virgin’s are not saints; they are the most failed of human beings, I argue.

    But then Martin is confused about his own life, soon after beginning to realize that he is also attracted to men, and admitting to his bedmate that he has had same-sex relationships in the past, while trying to reassure him that he has no intentions of attempting any sexual activity with him.

      He does begin a workshop, with his brother’s help, on explaining to students how they might curate, as he had, a film series. But they cannot even imagine why they should want to do that, and why he is requiring such an arduous task of watching so many movies. Film theorist Jalal Toufic (whose first book I published), once described to me just such a rebellion of his students at San Francisco State University.

     It takes the interruption and explanation of their current teacher to try to make one particularly stubborn student why understanding why and how they the love some films more than others is crucial if you are all interested in movies. In short, film-going is not a passive activity. But the teacher’s actions, once more leaves Martin without any ability to explain his own reasons and methods.

    The teacher, however, has important connections with the French film world, even revealing that he personally knows one of Martin’s most beloved actresses, Françoise Lebrun, to whom he is soon introduced after a special showing of her major film at the Cinémathèque française, also meeting her next-door apartment dweller, Bastien (Samuel Fasse), with whom he almost immediately falls in love.

   Yet upon their first sexual get-together, Martin rushes away without consummating the sexual act, too confused still about his sexuality.

     Similarly, on one of her tours, Léa encounters a somewhat older avant-garde composer Jérôme (Pascal Cervo) who lives on a barge. She visits him, but also moves away after a kiss, not sure she wants to more forward because of the age difference.

      Both, determined now to stay in Paris, seems strangely out of sync with the residents of the “City of amour.”

      Françoise, however, goes shopping for a new couch, suggesting Bastien will help her carry in upstairs to her apartment, with the help of the volunteer Martin.

      The two men struggle with the couch, finally delivering it up to her apartment, both collapsing in Bastien’s nest door apartment, and soon after joining one another for sex, Martin obviously having come to terms with his sexuality.

     Léa, moreover, decides to continue with her relationship with Jérôme, who ultimately hosts a barge party for a Parisian celebration, replete with fireworks, Léa inviting Martin and his friends Bastien and Tristan. It appears at the party that Tristan hits it off with Léa’s roommate who works as an airline stewardess, so perhaps he will not have to suffer the curse of sainthood after all.

      Jérôme finishes his choral symphony, in which Léa now performs, inviting Martin to the performance. The two meet cordially and pleasantly afterwards, both having moved on in lives with acceptance of love and worlds outside of their childhood infatuation.

     This movie is also nicely punctuated with beautiful music by Schumann and Ravel throughout.

      Love Blooms is most certainly not a showy film, and it suffers, as do its characters, from all shorts of unsurety and fears for the future. But it is truly a beautiful and hopeful film, reminding us all again how we must abandon our notions, at times, we acquired in the past and boldly move forward into new love and perhaps even different sexuality. Why this lovely 2018 film has been so critically ignored is truly inexplicable.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).