Love is fragile, awkward, painful, and hilarious. Sometimes awkwardly, painfully hilarious. Love is all of these things, but above all it is something even more–love is not your fault.

This is the message I pondered through most of Un baiser s’il vous plaît, a kitschy romantic comedy with an occasional cruel streak that aired today at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the museum’s summer French film festival. I’m sticking with the French title here not because I’m pretentious (though I am) but because the English translation, Shall We Kiss?, might make you expect to see Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez dancing around and giving each other awkward glances. No, that would be the wrong impression. The actual awkwardness in this movie transcends anything a Hollywood actor could conjure up (except maybe Woody Allen), and this is probably why the writer-director Emmanuel Mouret plays the lead role himself. With a few nervous glances and breathily uttered “oui”s from Virginie Ledoyen to back him up, Mouret shows us that even the liberated French have the occasional embarrassing sexual experience–in this case, comically, excruciating so. Then again, they probably make up for it by having even more of the non-embarrassing kind.

The plot is simple yet clever, and starts with a question. A Parisian woman visiting Nantes goes on a dinner date with a helpful stranger, and at the end of the night, she finds herself fending off his advances by telling him–and the audience–a cautionary tale. An explanation for why she is so reluctant to let him kiss her goodnight, because apparently, in France already being in a relationship isn’t a good enough reason. So begins the heart of the film.

The story-within-a-story concerns Nicolas (played by Mouret) and Judith (Ledoyen), two childhood best friends who unexpectedly find themselves having a toe-curling, rational-thought-shattering, life-derailing love affair. I say “unexpectedly” because this is clearly what the film wants us to believe, but when a character starts confiding his unfulfilled craving for “physical affection” to a best friend who conveniently looks like Natalie Portman, you have to wonder. I won’t even mention Nicolas’ harebrained, emotionally dubious plan to “cure” himself of his craving, for which he enlists the aid of Judith, and she dutifully accepts, if for no other reason than to drive the plot forward.

If I sounded cynical just now, then consider it a testament to the storytelling that none of these thoughts actually went through my mind until after the movie. Instead, I was as taken in by the magic as everyone else. So what if in real life, just smiling at a woman doesn’t automatically cause the universe to cut to a scene of you sitting at dinner with her? Or if putting on Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” won’t automatically lead to amazing sex with your high school friend, especially if you’ve been living with your real significant other for (evidently) a very long time? All that matters is that these things do happen in Mouret’s script, and effortlessly so. The humor and delight of watching them comes from the feeling that the hypothetical situations unfolding on screen could have been your own ideas, gathered from a “what if” conversation with a few very witty friends at a cocktail party.

The thing about creative and hilarious ideas having to do with relationships, though, is that most of them are actually bad ideas in real life. As if to demonstrate this, the plot eventually devolves from awkward romantic comedy to awkward romantic trainwreck, and you start to feel like you’re watching some weird French adaptation of Closer. But in the nick of time, through a combination of narrative trickery and good, solid storytelling, the film brings everything full circle back to the dinner date, and to a strangely satisfying–if still a bit mysterious–conclusion.

Ostensibly, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of the movie is simple. The woman couldn’t accept the kiss at the end of the date because it could prove to be too dangerous, too tempting. Like the characters in her story, she views passion as an externality to our social lives that can’t be resisted, only avoided if need be. The sensible thing to do (“sensé,” as she puts it) as an adult is to hold on to some stable state of contentment and guard it jealously against the reckless hurricane Love. Yet the events that do take place, in the lives of Nicolas and Judith, and even her own date, say exactly the opposite–give in to the winds, because one has no choice in the matter anyhow. Love is not a personal responsibility.

Of course, my philosophizing here is completely opposite of the tone of the movie, which is lighthearted, clever, and subtle. The relationship between Nicolas and Judith is as intense and nuanced as in a Woody Allen movie, and the dialogue is as effortless as the existential circumlocution in Breathless or some other New Wave art flick. In the end, it might just be due to it being in French that the movie somehow achieves lightness on a premise that would have doomed it to romantic comedy mediocrity in English. But the effect is real, and if your heart isn’t warmed by this film, it’ll at least be gripped by vicarious embarrassment and fear by the end of it. And isn’t that the point of any good movie–to make us feel?

Un baiser s’il vous plaît on IMBD
Un baiser s’il vous plaît: Official site (French)