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LOVE ME IF YOU DARE Send This Review to a Friend
What starts as a charming friendship between two youngsters ends nastily with a splash of fantasy in writer-director Yann Samuell's French import "Love Me If You Dare." There's amusement and romance between, but after a while the destructive escapades become just too exasperating as diminishing returns set in for the audience.
We first meet Julien and Sophie when they are eight. Sophie is teased by her schoolmates for being of Polish ethnicity, and Julien comes to her rescue. This establishes a mischievous bond between them, and they proceed to take dares with each other to see how far they can go.
By the time they are young adults, the dares take on a more serious aspect, and become ever more destructive. Marion Cotillard as Sophie and Guillaume Canet as Julien carry out a love-hate relationship in which cruelty is mixed with depth of feeling, and we know nothing good can emerge from where they are headed in the span of their lives.
Filmmaker Samuell treats the material as a fairy tale, exemplified ultimately by the choice of possible endings. The film might have well ended sooner. "Love Me If You Dare" does have its moments if you can get carried away by its style and the acting, but it is too precious by far to be taken very seriously after some of the initial gambits in which the adult Sophie and Julien compete to upstage each other with creative nastiness. A Paramount Classics release.
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