Love Me If You Dare review

Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard) are outsiders. As a child Sophie is bullied for being a Polish immigrant in France, while Julien inhabits a fantasy world in order to block out the imminent death of his ailing mother. When Julien rescues Sophie from a band of taunting children they form an inseparable friendship, based on a series of dares that become increasingly bold as the months and eventually years go by. The relationship and the dares continue into their adult life, so when they both attend college together, Julien dares Sophie to attend her maths exam with her underwear on the outside, and Sophie replies by challenging him to sleep with the next girl in the queue for the test.

The central characters of Yann Samuel's first feature have a love-hate, brother and sister relationship that is always underpinned by sexual and romantic emotions which latently fuel their complex relationship. It's as if they were twins or soulmates separated by an inability to express their real emotions. Samuel's film has been something of a success in his native France, but the inevitable comparisons with Amelie may prevent it from being an equally big success overseas.

Part of the problem is that while the two characters believe that their destiny is always going to be intertwined, their intensely private world is hard to relate to for the viewer. This is fuelled by the fact that both characters come across as somewhat selfish, and as they get older the dares that they issue become more and more vindictive. What begins as a whimsical and innocuous relationship soon sours into a battle of emotional strength, as Julien bitterly upsets Sophie over a wedding proposal, only for her to get her own back during the actual ceremony itself.

It's a given that all films require some form of leap of faith on behalf of the viewer, but if the characters give little to identify with, then this job is made all the harder. The idea of grown-ups setting each other harsher and harsher challenges doesn't work simply because there is little emotional involvement for the audience to latch on to.

The production values are first class, but too often Samuel chooses to make his picture look at pretty as possible without putting the characters first. So much so that many of the sequences, notably a rain-soaked finale, look like high-end car commercials, and this artificiality only further serves to make the film's events more distant. And while La Vie En Rose is undoubtedly a beautiful song to place any piece of film to, the five or six different versions used here are only signs of overkill. The film's original French title - Jeux D'Enfants - unwittingly echoes the childish and often annoying events that it depicts.