With L’amour c’est mieux que la vie, 80s Claude Lelouch makes his fiftieth film ★★★☆☆

When you realize your fiftieth feature film in your eighties, and that also in the middle of the corona pandemic, you can shout it from the rooftops. That’s what French veteran Claude Lelouch does, in the opening sequence of L’amour c’est mieux que la vie. In those same first minutes of Lelouch’s ‘not so dramatic comedy’, the audience is welcomed in 2020 and we waltz from Paris to Easter Island. As if the film doesn’t care about travel restrictions and lockdowns, and has no time to lose in the meantime.

The main character of L’amour c’est mieux que la vie runs out of time on its own. Gérard (Gérard Darmon), an elderly, filthy rich ex-criminal, is terminally ill. He would like to travel around the world, but that is made impossible by the pandemic.

The corona crisis offers Lelouch a good excuse to let Gérard walk through a deflated, wistful Paris, while visiting his son Kev and elderly father Robert. The latter is performed by Robert Hossein, who died in 2020, who also appeared in Lelouch’ classic Les uns et les authors (1981) played: graceful fragments from that film serve here, among other things, as Robert’s flashbacks. They give L’amour c’est mieux que la vie moreover, the character of a farewell.

The plot is quite corny. Gerard’s best friends Ary and Philippe hire the chic escort Sandrine (Sandrine Bonnaire), hoping that Gérard will have one last-ditch romance with her. Gérard’s fate is also determined by Jesus (Xavier Inbona) and the devil (Béatrice Dalle), who with their interventions provide for tasty absurdism, but also make the whole thing somewhat formless.

Fortunately, Prat and Bonnaire have some nice scenes together, like the one in which they express their crush as soberly and romantically. It is at such moments that the film is at its most sympathetic and human.