Spirited emptiness

Rating: Null/10 (26 November 2011)

The second half of a movie that started 10 years ago, the second half of a relationship with these people. Few things have changed since; so again we have a film worked in someone's typewriter; two actors of some talent brought in to improvise a chemistry and flesh a connection; a passive camera attached to these people, more or less the same medium shot tracking them down Paris.
We get to see that both have changed since we first met them. She has grown despondent in her spirited idealism, his cynicism has been mellowed by more experience inside of him. Both have been deeply shaken by an encounter with the emptiness of life. Otherwise it plays very much like that earlier film, except with anxieties that have matured along with them.
But this one has the additional benefit of layering in that first film, a second perspective that was missing there. The man has written a book from the events that we experienced as that film. It could have been very potent stuff, like 2046 is to In the Mood for Love. There is some effort to comment on fictions shaped from memory, but it is light-weight stuff at best.
The other thing that could have been potent is how the gap between these two films is handled, the part that went unfilmed and is actual life away from the camera. How they handle it in turn, between them. It is again a disappointment; we know within the first 15 minutes all that is to know, who showed up and who didn't. It's even more slight if you consider that we got a film like Certified Copy since.
What is left is that scene where Celine goes boating. She gets to see the Seine from a perspective hitherto unexplored, a touristy view. They bare their souls with a little less cuteness this time, but maybe these two were not worth getting to know in the first place, or this filmmaker to tell us about them.