Film

People do nutty things in the name of love during the course of Christophe Honoré’s movies: burst into impromptu duets, dance on window ledges, demand that strangers reciprocate instant crushes. The French filmmaker’s latest ode to l’amour fou is set in the hormonally charged world of high school, thus underwriting an unprecedented level of emotional volatility; in addition to a pop-musical number à la Honoré’s Love Songs (2007), there’s also a fistfight between smitten students, scissor brandishing and a suicide. Don’t look to the teachers for stability either, as the math professor (Garrel) just broke up with his girlfriends (note the plural) in order to pursue the titular “beautiful person” (Seydoux) full-time. Even by Gallic cinema’s passion-trumps-sanity standards, these romantically entangled academics seem one small step away from being institutionalized.

A loose modernization of Madame de la Fayette’s 17th-century novel The Princess of Clèves, Honoré’s reference-heavy drama again proves that he’s a brilliant director with actors (watch for a priceless look of shock that passes across Garrel’s Picasso-painting puss; you wish it were infinitely looped). It’s also a reminder that he’s a maddeningly messy, inconsistent filmmaker, unable to breathe new life into a musty cliché like the mistaken love-letter chestnut, or keep pleasantly loose dramatics from devolving into a shambles.