{"id":26186,"date":"2019-10-16T10:57:44","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T08:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=26186"},"modified":"2025-12-04T22:35:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T21:35:40","slug":"room-212-and-the-duration-of-a-love-affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/cinema\/films\/room-212-and-the-duration-of-a-love-affair\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00abRoom 212\u00bb and the space-time of love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cinema Wednesdays - Jonas Follonier<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With <\/strong>Room 212<\/strong><\/em>, Christophe Honor\u00e9 has achieved a feat: to occupy space in a way it has never been occupied before. Unafraid of well-written dialogue and a refusal to be naturalistic, the established filmmaker delivers a theatrical tale about the duration of a marriage, carried by a casting<\/em> breathtaking.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This is the story of a married couple whose daily life is turned upside down by an explicit text message. Maria (Chiara Mastroianni) is unmasked by her husband Richard (Benjamin Biolay). In her defense, Maria decides to play up her light thigh, arguing that no couple lasts long unless both spouses go off and have sex from time to time, and that sex has nothing to do with love. Yes, except that Richard has never cheated on her in twenty years of union. While he broods in the living room of their apartment, Maria grabs her things and heads off to spend the night at the hotel across the street, in a room overlooking their apartment. It's an ingenious set-up that allows Honor\u00e9 to deploy his entire staging artillery, based on this spatial face-off. On a magical Parisian street, itself the stuff of fantasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her room 212, referring to the article of the French Civil Code on the duty of fidelity of both spouses, Maria meets Richard, but not the forty-five-year-old man she's married to and who's sulking in the building opposite, no: the man in the hotel room is the young Richard she once loved (Vincent Lacoste). This is the next stage in Christophe Honor\u00e9's doubling operation, which is followed by the appearance in Maria's room of her then-rival, Richard's piano teacher (Camille Cottin), the appearance of all her lovers, past and present (and there are many), and of her will, personified by a Charles Aznavour look-alike (in broad strokes) (St\u00e9phane Roger). The doubling is present in every detail of the film, with the descending of a scale on the piano without the touch of a finger, or the ordering of two glasses of whisky per person - yet another possible interpretation of this number 212.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also: <\/strong>The double lover<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, from sex to torment<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The space-time of Now<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From the very first minutes of the film, after a clandestine love scene in which the motif of doubling is already present, the sound of the song <\/a>Now<\/a><\/em> by Charles Aznavour. We weren't expecting to hear this cult song so soon, which was featured in the film's highly effective trailer. But Christophe Honor\u00e9 always seems to find himself where he's not expected, and therefore in the right place. Not that the surprise is justified on its own; when you're dealing with a talented artist, you know it's going to be as good as the artist's ability to make sense of it. And so this song Now<\/em> that one would have expected at a moment of great amorous break-up appears at the end of a simple one-night stand. A married woman's lover is still her husband, but her husband as he was, her husband as he could be or could have been, her husband as he is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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