Past Love Syndrome: A wacky and tender comedy (review)
Having a child is still just as difficult for the Sirot-Balboni duo, who with their second feature assert themselves as rising hopes of Belgian comedy.
After having tried everything to have a child, Rémy and Sandra turn to a new doctor who diagnoses them with the poetic “past loves syndrome”. They will therefore have to sleep with all their respective exes to hope to become parents. On this absurd and crazy premise, the young couple embraces different contemporary questions about love: why this desire for a child? why does Sandra’s number of exes embarrass Rémy? Why is she embarrassed when he fully embarks on the mission? Each of the encounters (trouple, libertines, etc.) serves as a new romantic scenario, an inventive balance found by other romantics.
The walls of the apartment show the progress of the therapeutic treatment followed, and completely carry the story into an assumed kitsch aesthetic, perfectly suited to the light and zany tone of the film. The representation of sex outside the couple is distanced by phantasmagorical scenes which involve dance and animal costumes, thus recalling the difference in the nature of the act depending on the partner with whom it is carried out. Despite its conclusion with a slight loss of intensity, the new feature film by Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni (A crazy life) pertinently questions where heteronormative romantic relationships stand. It calls into question almost all the certainties that the couple had at the start, and is overwhelming with the tenderness with which it leads its characters to conceive of love differently.
Nicholas Moreno
By Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni. With Lucie Debay, Lazare Gousseau, Nora Hamzawi… Duration 1h29. Released October 25, 2023
