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Romantic comedies, like any well-established genre, rely on a number of stock characters and plots, succeeding or failing based on how they color in around the edges. French film The Names of Love (Le Nom des Gens) picks up the mismatched lovers theme, throws in a couple of winning performances from its romantic leads, attempts a bit of social commentary, but ultimately falters in the end, when it returns to the well-worn plot devices.
Adhering to convention, the mismatched lovers in this case include an older, conservative, and emotionally repressed man and a younger, liberated, and more adventurous woman. The man is Arthur Martin, an expert in animal diseases whose most defining feature seems to be that he shares a name with a prominent brand of home appliances. The woman is Baya Benmahmoud, the daughter of an Algerian immigrant and a woman who’s so in the moment that receiving a phone call immediately after getting out of the shower sends her out of the apartment stark naked. Of course, these two polar opposites are destined to meet, fall in love, experience a massive setback, and realize that they are exactly what the other has needed all along.
The lead performances by Jacques Gamblin and Sara Forestier as Arthur and Baya are clearly the best thing going for the film. Gamblin manages to layer genuine warmth into Arthur’s many levels of repression, while Forestier conveys Baya’s manic energy and rapid-fire dialogue without sounding shrill. They have an easy chemistry together, and the middle portions flow nicely once they’ve gotten past their initial cute meetings and misunderstandings.
The film also attempts to weave in some social issues by placing Arthur and Baya at radically different ends of the social spectrum, mostly in a subplot about Baya’s approach to politics. An avowed leftist, she considers it her mission to seduce right-wing men and thereby make them more open to her own views. While this makes for some entertaining comedic moments between her and the considerably more reserved Arthur, it doesn’t always play well, especially when the film ties her proclivity for sexual conquest to an inappropriate relationship with an adult when she was a young girl.
There’s also a subplot involving Arthur’s mother, who witnessed her parents’ deportation during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. As with Baya’s political flamboyance, this provides some interesting character detail for Arthur, but the film suffers whenever it diverts attention from the couple’s developing relationship.
These sidetracks into social and political subplots, as well as the film’s eventual retreat into the expected plot developments, do the characters a disservice. The last twenty minutes or so feel a bit perfunctory, as if the Arthur and Baya are simply going through the motions expected of them because that’s just what happens in movies like this.
In the end, The Names of Love is an imperfect movie about two enjoyably flawed people surprised to find happiness in each other and looking for ways to hold onto it. For all of the things it doesn’t get quite right, it succeeds in making them both likable and worth rooting for.
