3 Hearts

A love triangle like you’ve never seen before. The story gets tangled up in a the web of feelings and passions while gradually unveiling hidden secrets so deep that they can be musically expressed only by ominous, almost horror-like music, all while keeping everything completely matter-of-fact and believable and rendering every look, gesture and tone of voice in precise psychological detail. And the director skillfully adds a mild tinge of absurdity to it all. Three Hearts is a masterpiece not everyone is able to appreciate. (21/12/2016)

I don’t know if I’m a more spiteful viewer than the film assumes, but instead of being moved, I was amused by the exaggerated thoroughness with which the screws of the melodramatic narrative are tightened. Truffaut handled the genre conventions skilfully and was fond of using the commentary of an unbiased narrator. However, I also remembered Truffaut, one of the founders of the French New Wave, in the context of his interview with Hitchcock. You can either shock the viewer by suddenly letting a bomb hidden under the table explode, or you can show the bomb in advance and keep the viewer in suspense for several minutes, wondering when it will explode. In 3 Hearts, the protagonist’s heart is such a bomb and we spend nearly the whole film waiting for it to go off, which is due to more than just the horror feel of some of the scenes. At the same time, the film works as a darkly humorous thriller without looking down on the characters or spoiling the experience for those viewers who don’t want to laugh at the (literally) incredible irony of fate, but rather cry about it. However, it shows one of the possible paths that melodrama can take today if it is not to be ridiculed for its old-fashioned nature. 75% (05/02/2015)

Despite the fact that I'm not very familiar with French films and their mentality in general, and that I'm far from being in tune with everything that appeals to the classic attributes of the land of the Gallic rooster, I consider 3 Hearts to be very good. It’s an absolute melodrama with very believable emotions, and it's the kind of thing that you don’t see very often. Yet such are also the winding paths of the heartland. (03/07/2016)