Love Hurts has one of those annoying English titles that directors are increasingly giving French language films: the logic is of course that an English title attracts more people because many more people speak English than French. And certainly there's the excuse that this thirty-two minute film is inspired by American movies, the soundtrack is laden with American songs from the sixties, and 'Love Hurts' is the title of one of them, but not played in this film. Fine, but all the same...
Elsa Rysto's favourite film is Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, her second favourite is A Clockwork Orange, and although these two films are wildly different in content and style, etc, a definite logic follows from this when we watch Love Hurts: Sam (Noée Abita) is one of the two main characters, Troy (Andranic Manet) the other, and this is a movie about gratuitous violence – and love.
When the shy, easily impressionable Sam first meets Troy he takes her aside in a woodland setting and at first frightens her, then frightens her some more by asking her to hit him, but hard, as he can't feel pain. She asks if he's high on pain-killers, but no. And she gets bloody knuckles as he asks for more and shows no reaction to the hit he takes.
This, all right, is adolescence and kids have to go through everything, have to experience extremes in growing up, and hey, that's part of growing up itself. But Sam goes though various emotions, as kids do, and although the rest of the school know that Troy has been expelled for violence, and it's said that he beat a guy into a coma, she still sides with him, fights for him, is him, because that's what love's all about: no? Psychotic? What?
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