"Tell me, can you love life and let love find you when you are lost?"
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Our language is expressive of the presence and importance of the heart. We use words such as heartwarming, heartless, and heartbroken to describe the different shadings of this complex emotion which doubles as the organ that keeps us alive. We live or die according to our relationship with our heart.
3 Hearts is an emotionally vibrant drama about something that seems to be a favorite theme of French filmmakers — a seventh sense of heart intelligence. The three main characters each make their own encounter with the life force that radiates from the center of their being.
"Deep listening from the heart is one half of true communication. Speaking from the heart is the other half."
— Sara Paddison
Marc (Benoit Poelvoorde) is a tax inspector from Paris who misses his train back to the city and finds himself stranded in Valence, a small town. He is a man who savors women; he delights in being with them and talking about their experiences and emotions. By chance, he bumps into Sylvie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and they spend the night walking through the town talking about things that matter to them.
She is so entranced by this middle-aged man and his "heart intelligence" that she packs her suitcase and walks out on her boyfriend in order to meet Marc in Paris. She wants to see where their intimate connections will take them. It is a bold step to take for her, and he reveals his flawed personality by missing their rendezvous thanks to two Chinese clients and then suffering a minor heart attack. Sylvie, heartbroken, returns to Valence and decides to accompany her boyfriend to Minneapolis where he has gotten a new job.
"Think not you can direct the course of love, for love if it finds you worthy, directs your course."
— Kahil Gibran
Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni) is Sylvie's beloved sister. They manage an antique shop togetherWithout her assistance on the finances of this operation, Sophie goes to see a tax expert who is none other than Marc. They fall in love and her mother (Catherine Deneuve) gives her blessing on the wedding.
Director Benoit Jasquot and screenplay writer Julien Boivent make the most of the acting talents of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Chiara Mastroianni who are both credible as loving sisters and women yearning for intimacy and sex with a man who is emotionally intelligent. Benoit Poelvoorde fills the bill as Marc who finds himself in a painful situation when Sylvie discovers his identity.
"A love map of everyone we have ever loved may be stored forever within us in a form of info-energy imprint, infinitely reverberating sounds and a set of subtle energetic patterns stored in our cells."
— Paul Pearsall
3 Hearts is the kind of subtle and slow-moving film that compels us to revisit the intimate moments on our own private love map in order to review what we have learned from our early and often error-filled experiments in heart intelligence.
Screened at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, 2015, Lincoln Center, New York.
