Taglines: True love is a complicated affair.
Shall We Kiss? When Gabriel and Emilie meet by chance, he offers her a ride, and they spend the evening talking, laughing and getting along famously. At the end of the night, Emilie declines Gabriel’s offer of “a kiss without consequences”. Emilie admonishes him that the kiss could have unexpected consequences, and tells him a story, unfolding in flashbacks, about the impossibility of indulging your desires without affecting someone else’s life.
Shall We Kiss? (French title: Un baiser s’il vous plaît) is a 2007 French romantic comedy film directed by Emmanuel Mouret and starring Virginie Ledoyen, Mouret, Julie Gayet, Michaël Cohen, Frédérique Bel and Stefano Accorsi.
Film Review for Shall We Kiss?
Impossibly charming and impossibly French (though readymade for a Hollywood remake), Shall We Kiss? is a comic romance full of rueful musings about fidelity and true love.
Written, directed by and starring Emmanuel Mouret – whose onscreen persona is shaggy and shambling – the film follows a man and woman who are closest of friends, but whose friendship turns to sexual desire and then knock-down-the-house obsession.
So what’s the problem? Well, she, Judith (the elegant Virginie Ledoyen), is already married to the nice, funny, caring Claudio (Stefano Accorsi). She doesn’t have the heart to hurt her spouse, even as her relationship with Nicolas (Mouret) has changed from intimately platonic to just plain intimate.
Framed as a story recounted by a Paris fabric designer (Julie Gayet) to an attractive stranger (Michaël Cohen) encountered on a business trip to Nantes, Shall We Kiss? pulses with desire. Cautionary words are spoken about the dangers of following your heart – and the danger if you don’t.
Ledoyen and Mouret’s characters’ initially tentative venture into lovemaking is full of humorously awkward commentary. Gayet and Cohen, as the storyteller and her happily enthralled audience of one, are likewise appealing – to us and to each other. Shall We Kiss? may not be deep, but it’s deeply delightful.
Second Review for Shall We Kiss?
Shall We Kiss is devised and performed by that rather melancholy actor Emmanuel Mouret, who fashions his own light comedies about love and romance built around characters almost as shy as Mouret himself is in person.
The conceit in this one is the framing of the story by another meeting in which a woman refuses to give a goodnight kiss to a man she meets and likes. Kisses are dangerous, she suggests, and launches into the tale about the perilous romance between Nicholas (played by Mouret), a man with sexual hang-ups to do with kissing who finds himself making out with his married best friend who offers her services as a sexual warmer-upper, if you like, via lip contact.
Virginie Ledoyan plays Judith, but the film goes badly awry, I think. There is something coy and miscalculated about it all. Mouret is quite talented fas an actor but maybe it’s time he found another writer.
Shall We Kiss? (2008)
Un Baiser s’il vous Plaît
Directed by: Emmanuel Mouret
Starring: Julie Gayet, Michaël Cohen, Virginie Ledoyen, Stefano Accorsi, Emmanuel Mouret, Frédérique Bel, Mélanie Maudran, Marie Madinier, Lucciana de Vogüe, Camille Rince
Screenplay by: Emmanuel Mouret
Production Design by: David Faivre
Cinematography by: Laurent Desmet
Film Editing by: Martial Salomon
Art Department by: Yann Cannamela
Distributed by: TFM Distribution
Release Date: March 28, 2008
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