Love has no limits, nationality or ethnicity. But we already know that from many books and movies. However, the way Les Frères Lopez address these valences of contemporary love, in the context of a world haunted by wars and racism, manages to provide spectators with a nonconformist and complex cinematic experience, offering a tragicomic version of a coup de foudre scenario. ‘InLove‘ is, therefore, a short film defying most of the stylistic patterns depicted in artworks of the moment, synthesizing in a few minutes a series of contradictory emotions that will make you laugh and cry with the same intensity. Using the socio-cultural elements that describe the interethnic tensions of the current conflicts, Les Frères Lopez succeed in creating a brief insight into the anatomy of the deepest feeling, presenting both the premise of a special love story and the sad ending of the emotional chemistry of the two protagonists who cannot overcome the absurd violence of political ideals.
When a French squad stops for a few minutes in a Middle East village, a young soldier suddenly falls in love with a Muslim girl after he sees her photo on a social network. It just so happens that the girl is right in the proximity of the men who are waiting for new orders from their bosses. Thus, the two protagonists succeed to meet face to face, to silently admire each other, to shyly change a few words that make them forget the world around them. But shortly after this providential visual contact they will be separated because of the young soldier’s duty for his own country.
Despite somewhat amusing premise describing the virtual contact between the two main characters, this short film deceives the viewer’s expectations in the last few seconds, cynically illustrating the dysfunctional mechanism of Islamophobia that is specific to the political conflicts of the moment. By opting for a clear, bright imagery that reproduces the solemnity and the landscape poetry of the vast Oriental desert spaces, Les Frères Lopez’s project is a bittersweet confession about the fragility of the interhuman attachment that is incapable of opposing political beliefs. The touching purity and naivety of love at first glance that directors manage to filter through some elementary gestures surpasses the standards of a conventional romantic comedy by brutally separating the two lovers who anticipate the catastrophic destiny of the Muslim village. ‘InLove’ is a complex experiment, despite the discursive minimalism on which it relies, managing to capture the essence of intense and tragic love that conceals one of the great social woes of the moment caused by seemingly endless armed conflicts.
For the naivety and sincerity with which it captures the first emotions of deep love, for the humanism with which it renders the interhuman attachment defying the social, political and cultural norms, for the intelligence with which it combines the tragic and comic register to synthesize within a few minutes the pattern of great couples of literature and cinema, but also for the extraordinary quality of the image that materializes the story of the protagonists, ‘InLove’ was awarded with the 2nd Film of the Month distinction in the October 2018 edition of TMFF.
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