A French Braid of Not-So-Illicit Affairs

“Any couple in love should remember that love might not last,” says someone midway through “Three Friends,” shrugging off a rebuffed kiss with impressively unruffled Gallic poise. If everyone were so sanguine about such matters, most varieties of love story wouldn’t have reason to exist. Certainly a film like Emmanuel Mouret‘s chablis-dry romantic comedy, in which consenting adults fret and fritter over semi-consenting adultery, would be far more of a novelty than it is. Drolly unpicking the sexual and emotional entanglements of three Lyon gal pals hovering around 40 — two married, one single, none fulfilled — Mouret’s film won’t strike anyone as fresh, either within his directorial oeuvre or that whole cinematic subgenre dedicated to French philandering, but it’s easy, breezy, pleasingly grownup viewing.

Mouret has been turning out variations on this formula since his debut “Laissons Lucie faire!” in 2000, once dipping into heritage cinema with the 2018 period piece “Lady J,” but otherwise sticking to a trusty template for chatty contemporary relationship studies that tend to draw the cream of French acting talent. Though he’s a fixture in his home country (2020’s “Love Affair(s)” scored a whopping 13 César nominations), his work has only intermittently crossed over to international arthouses. With its Venice competition berth marking Mouret’s first time in the top tier of a Big Three fest, “Three Friends” might well raise his auteur profile, though it’s neither formally nor thematically much of a departure for him.

As for its influences, the film tips its hand as early as its opening credits: jazz piano, black screen, centered white titles in a serif typeface awfully close to Woody Allen’s signature Windsor Light Condensed. As much as Allen has borrowed from the likes of Rohmer and Truffaut across his career, the French have returned the compliment in terms of homage, though not always quite this transparently. With its roundelay of affairs and betrayals centered on a close female trio, intermittently narrated by a secondary male character, the superficial resemblance to “Hannah and Her Sisters” is obvious, though “superficial” is the word: Mouret doesn’t probe very deeply into his characters or their changeable desires, though he moves them around with some elan.

Our self-effacing narrator is Victor (Mouret regular Vincent Macaigne), the schlubby, doting husband of high-school English teacher Joan (India Hair), who is beginning to feel stifled by his unwavering devotion. “Pinpointing the beginning of the story is difficult,” says Victor in voiceover — and likewise, Joan isn’t sure exactly when she fell out of love with her sweet, kindly, endlessly supportive spouse, but she’s sure it’s a terminal change of heart. When she admits as much to her colleague and best friend Alice (“Call Your Agent” star Camille Cottin), she expects a shocked response. Instead, Alice casually states that it’s perfectly normal to be married but not in love: She’s regarded her husband Eric (Grégoire Ludig) with dispassionate affection for years, and that works just fine for her.

The trick, Alice says, is for your husband to think you’re as loyally besotted with him as he is with you. What she doesn’t know is that Eric is embroiled in a long-term affair with Alice and Joan’s scatty, unmarried art-teacher friend Rebecca (Sara Forestier), who regularly confides in her friends her frustrated-mistress woes, just without naming any names. Unable to accept Alice’s idea of marital compromise, Joan confesses her feelings to Victor, whose reaction pivots from acceptance — so maturely constructive that it twists into denial — to self-destructive anguish. As Joan tentatively puts her marriage behind her, entering a friendship with new colleague and neighbor Thomas (Damien Bonnard) that strains at the possibility of something more, Alice impulsively dips a toe in the infidelity pool, only for her cool emotional composure to crack for the first time.

Mouret’s script, co-written with Carmen Leroi, weaves these slender strands into a neat snapshot of Xennial relationship politics — at least among the particular urban-bourgeois subset that these films tend to revolve around, with their comfy knitwear, repertory cinema dates and roomy homes haphazardly stacked with books. No subplot leads anywhere especially surprising, though there’s some witty, honest observation along the way of the hypocrisy that often comes with loosened marital strictures — Eric may be comfortable having an affair, but is unnerved by the thought of either his wife or his mistress not being exclusive. Moralizing is in short supply, though some characters inevitably conclude that home is where the heart is after all.

What’s missing is the close-up character detail that, as in Allen’s best work, would elevate this trifle from amusing to moving, though all the actors elegantly hit their comic marks — with Macaigne even landing an early blow to the heart with his aching, progressively crumpled realization that his marriage is over through no precise fault of his own. “Three Friends” is sparing with such intensity: Mouret’s direction is brisk and businesslike, with little expressive flair in Laurent Desmet’s soft, slightly washed-out lensing or Benjamin Esdraffo’s dainty keys-and-strings score, amply filled out with familiar classical pieces by Mozart, Ravel, Mendelssohn and more. Sometimes, as Allen noted in “Annie Hall’s” oft-repeated shark metaphor, it’s enough to keep things steadily moving, and that applies to relationships and filmmaking alike.