Two psychos you’ll love to hate

Fri., July 23, 2004

Ann Hornaday Washington Post

In “Love Me if You Dare,” first-time director Yann Samuell tells a toxic tale of young psychopaths in love, in which the stylish, often stunning visuals are ultimately outmatched by the repellent protagonists at the story’s center.

As grade-school students in France, Julien saves Sophie from a cruel episode of teasing, and the friends soon discover a mutual fascination with taking risks. Things escalate until they wind up before the school principal, in front of whom Julien proudly relieves himself on the office floor.

If you think this is cute, “Love Me if You Dare” is just your cup of arsenic. As Julien and Sophie grow into (nominal) adulthood, their taste for infantile behavior deepens. The friends (Guillaume Canet, Marion Cotillard) now engage in increasingly dizzy emotional mind games, taunting and teasing each other in and out of a possible romance.

In the film’s most effective scene, Julien takes Sophie out to dinner to discuss a marriage proposal, with truly shocking results. The scene would be an emotional knockout, too, if the audience cared at all about the characters. Instead, these two arrested adolescents – and the filmmaker himself – seem too wrapped up in their operatic sense of importance and self-regard to realize that narcissism is usually compelling only to the narcissist in question.

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