"Love is more beautiful than life" is a film as "Lelouchian" as its title: with its improvised dialogues, its impressionistic narration, guided by chance, its intertwined flashbacks, it will certainly not make the unanimity.

It tells the improbable crush between Gérard (Gérard Darmon), an incorrigible smoker who knows he is condemned by the disease and Sandrine (Sandrine Bonnaire), pimp for an agency of escort girls, sent on commissioned service by the friends of the first, to let her know love one last time.

The author of cult works such as "A man and a woman" (1966) or "Adventure is adventure" (1972), but also of films shattered by critics, shunned by the public, even sometimes the two had announced it as his ultimate feature film, but the farewell could go on forever: Lelouch, 84, now wants to make it the first part of a goodbye trilogy.

"I want with this trilogy to go to the end of my observations" on life, he explains to AFP, in the heavy leather armchairs of his lair, a restaurant-bar projection room at a stone's throw from the Arc de Triomphe.

"Initially, I wanted to make a single film, but it would have lasted six hours and no one would have seen it!".

"Everything that gave meaning to my life, I mean love, friendship, money, is in this film. Life and death fascinate me," he continues.

"My screenwriter has a colossal imagination: that's life".

"Spontaneity"

We meet in the film as well Robert Hossein for his last appearance before his death as Béatrice Dalle in the skin of the Devil, Kev Adams as Lino Ventura ("The Good Year", a Lelouch from 1973, summoned in archive images), in scenes sometimes with no obvious connection between them, but often haunted by the question of death.

Actor Ary Abittan - who has since been indicted for rape - plays one of the lead roles;

that of one of Gérard's friends, alongside Philippe Lellouche.

In the film, originally imagined as a world tour before the pandemic got involved and which finally takes place almost exclusively in Montmartre, Gérard makes "a last full of love" with Sandrine.

"This film is a mix of genres like all my films. I love mixing genres, because life is like that, good news and bad news are constantly alternating", confides Lelouch.

As is often the case with him, the dialogues were largely improvised, whispered by ear during filming.

"What I like about actors is when they stop playing, it's that all of a sudden they forget they're there to pretend and become human beings again", explains the one who six decades has turned Jean-Louis Trintignant as well as Belmondo, Jacques Villeret and Johnny Hallyday.

"I love spontaneity, I would like people to say of me that I was the director of spontaneity, of what is halfway between lies and truth," he adds.

At the time of the assessment, Claude Lelouch is proud to have founded two families, his seven children but also his fifty films: "my fifty children who all share the same DNA".

"I have always been a very criticized man because I have annoyed a lot", recognizes the director, who describes himself as "an amateur filmmaker who wants to remain one, who makes his films for love".

"I learned from my failures, from my suffering. And now, I'm going to try not to make the film too much".

© 2022 AFP