Un baiser papillon (2011)

Directed by: Karine Silla | 108 minutes | drama | Actors: Valeria Golino, Elsa Zylberstein, Vincent Perez, Jalil Lespert, Nicolas Giraud, Cécile De France, Roxane Depardieu, Iman Perez, Veronica Novak, Serge Hazanavicius, Edith Scob, Jolhan Martin, Catherine Hiegel, Camille Thomas, Abdellah Moundy, Alaa Safi

‘Un baiser papillon’ brings together different stories that do have a few things in common in terms of theme. This is often about motherhood and honesty and sincerity in relationships, and this sometimes creates magical and beautiful, recognizable moments. But often there is also too little involvement with the characters and the insights and emotions are flat. The film structure with stories running parallel and intertwined can lead to a deeper or greater insight, but it can also backfire because too little time is spent with the characters and too many side jumps are made. The latter unfortunately happens a bit too often in ‘Un baiser papillon’.

It feels like a missed opportunity, because if the director had tightened the reins a little more, it could have been an emotional and true film. Unfortunately, there is now too much distraction. Such as the whims of the black sheep Paul, who not only hinders Billie and Vincent’s lives, but also enters into a fleeting relationship with a hooker and tries to save her from her pimp. In addition, the relationship between Alice and her husband has barely developed and we only see her go through life unhappy because of the apparent monotony of their Parisian life (they go to the same place every year on summer holidays and hubby always buys the same sandwiches for breakfast). Her child’s fear of separation is potentially interesting (he is afraid of the dark, and apparently, according to an expert in the film, this is actually a fear of death) but the treatment of this problem also remains very sketchy.

This applies to many of the stories, none of which are completely successful, but all have beautiful moments. Valeria Golino is vulnerable but serene as a woman who doesn’t want to be patronized and pathetic during the last days of her life. It is not a new approach or wish, but the way she expresses her feelings is simple yet striking: while watching a beautiful ballet lesson from her daughter, she explains that she does not want to die with them, she wants to live with them. life. Above all, she wants to feel the joy of living with them, and not let everything revolve around the approaching death. Also nice is her “confession” that she had expected that she would suddenly gain a lot of wisdom the moment the disease turned out to be irreversible, but she could only think about her shopping list.

Billie’s desire to have children is, then, very understandable, and frustrating because of her difficulty coming to conception, and the other priorities of her boyfriend, who is mostly lost in his music (especially Vivaldi). But this story could also have gone deeper and now sometimes gets bogged down in melodrama and hysteria.

The music is beautiful, although it is not an original soundtrack. Aside from using a Vivaldi symphony for Billie’s husband’s conducting job, Badalamenti’s soundtrack has been used before, for David Lynch’s ‘The Straight Story’. Very fitting, yes.

It is nice in itself that not every story ends excessively rosy that there will still be a difficult road for different characters, but, as so often happens in these kind of “mosaic films”, everything ends very nicely at the end forged, and the quick fix and hopeful twist to any story is a bit too forced. It just adds a little too much to the awareness that this is a film with “symbolism” and good intentions, and not necessarily recognizable pieces from real people’s real lives.