The 1964 Cannes Film Festival was charmed by New Wave director Jacques Demy’s sumptuous, vivid musical The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. The unashamedly melodramatic cine-opera launched the career of its young star, Catherine Deneuve and carried off both the Palme d’Or and the OCIC award for Demy. If Christophe Honoré hopes to achieve similar success with his own musical, Les Chansons D’Amour, I suspect he’s in for a disappointment.

Honoré’s film employs the same three chapter structure and even the same chapter headings – Departure, Absence and Return – as The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, and the two pictures have a common theme of love and loss. But Chanson’s jaded bed-hopping, Gauloise-puffing, quotation-parrying Parisians are a world away from the bittersweet innocence of Cherbourg. The look of the film is also a contrast: rain-lashed, multi-cultural Paris streets and cluttered apartments rather than the supersaturated hues of Cherbourg or the glitz of the Hollywood musical.

Honoré is not the first French art house director to flirt with the musical genre – Jacques Rivette made Up/Down/Fragile in 1995, Francois Ozon camped it up with 8 Women in 2002 – nor is he the first director to come rather unstuck in the process. Not least of the film’s problems is the score: thirteen overly wordy, thoroughly unremarkable songs, breathily performed by a cast with no notable singing ability. It’s not the amateurishness of the renditions that grates however, after all Deneuve was no great chanteuse. Rather it’s the fact that the tone of the composition hardly shifts to match the emotional pitch of the story. We lurch from playful jealousy and lovers’ bickering to a sucker punch of a tragedy which comes from nowhere. But on the score, the same flat-footed ditties plod on relentlessly. There’s one especially dire offering which explores affairs of the heart entirely using fruit metaphors.

It’s been an unconventional journey for Honoré to arrive at this film – the former writer of children’s fiction has the gruelling incest drama Ma Mere on his CV. He followed Ma Mere with Dans Paris, a picture which shows a nascent glimpse of the musical to come: a telephone argument between lovers is performed as a song, an unexpected and disarming device that perhaps gave Honoré the courage to take on a full musical.

All three of these films have actor Louis Garrel in common. Over the course of his collaboration with Honoré, Garrel has developed an increasingly insufferable persona. He’s the temperamental man-child whose irresponsibility is out-weighed by his heavy-lidded sex-appeal. He deploys his charm indiscriminately, like cluster bombs. He performs mimes to amuse his doting in-laws. He’s the kind of man that women describe as ‘Impossible!’ but then sleep with anyway. In Chansons, he adds some sad clown shtick to his repertoire which is particularly noisome.

Garrel plays one side of a love triangle which also contains Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme. After a tragedy rocks the film, this triangle expands into something yet more complicated, a kind of irregular tetrahedron of combustible, unpredictable Gallic affairs. It’s a story which Honoré describes as personal, so we must assume that there is some truth at least in the premise. But the decision to set the story to music undermines the emotional honesty that the piece might otherwise have had.

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