BOYFRIENDS & GIRLFRIENDS Movie Review

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend
L'Ami de Mon Ami

Eric Rohmer's films seem to acquire almost as many titles as his characters do paramours. This sixth in his series of “Comedies and Proverbs,” for example, was known in England as My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, which is considerably closer to the original title of L'Ami de Mon Ami than is the vastly less specific American title Boyfriends and Girlfriends. (Still, it's less bizarre than The Green Ray's American title of Summer, which will now likely be confused with Rohmer's recent A Summer's Tale.) Whatever you call it, it's an absolutely delightful romantic comedy about a young woman living in a disorientingly neat and clean looking Parisian suburb, who indeed finds herself increasingly attracted to the boyfriend of her girlfriend. On the other hand, is she as attracted to him as she is attracted to the idea of being able to snare him? And what's her girlfriend up to in the meantime? Rohmer's films are a kind of reverse Seinfeld: they can appear to be about nothing, but in fact are almost always profoundly stirring and emotionally resonant in ways that may make you smile contentedly to yourself, hours, days, or weeks afterward.

NEXT STOP … Claire's Knee, Summer, Rules of the Game

1988 (PG) 102m/C FR Emmanuelle Chaulet, Sophie Renoir, Eric Viellard, Francois-Eric Gendron, Anne-Laure Meury; D: Eric Rohmer; W: Eric Rohmer; C: Bernard Lutic; M: Jean-Louis Valero. VHS, LV ORI