Les Chansons d'Amour

Christophe Honoré delivers another polymorphous, pansexual oddity, this time featuring a ménage-a-trois of Gauloise-puffing, bed-hopping, Parisian twenty-somethings who just happen to burst into song. A lot. Now, a spontaneous song-and-dance number or two would improve most French imports these days (Lady Chatterley: The Musical, anyone?), but Honoré's Love Songs is let down by its relentless succession of utterly unremarkable, wispy ditties, with lyrics so gratingly awkward that either the subtitler had a perverted sense of humour, or they really are singing about l'amour entirely through fruit metaphors. It starts off with a breeziness that's affable enough - look at them singing about threesomes and entertaining each other with charades for words like 'tranquillity' and 'despondency', all terribly, terribly French. But then the songs start to sound rather alike, something bizarrely tragic happens completely out of nowhere and they all get very depressed. And sing about it. A lot. [Laura Smith]