Whenever I'm Alone With You

A couple of planetary sized egotists who self-identify as ‘artists’ make a film about themselves and challenge you to like it or be branded as stupid.

Guillaume (Campanacci) is an actor, although not a very good one. He likes to compare himself to Alain Delon, but in his eagerness to embody the French New Wave he finds that disengaging from the world is the only thing he’s genuinely good at. At the end of his most recent relationship, Guillaume decided to make a suicide attempt, however, due to the size of his ego it was more of a ‘Hey, look at me’ rather than a real cry for help. His family help him back into the world but really Guillaume is already dead inside.

Vedrana (Egon) is a socialite, although only a pretty face in a nice dress most of the time. She is attached to an unnamed career man who cares more for his status than he does for her. This gives Vedrana plenty time to wander about the Cannes countryside and start an affair with the only person whose ego can possibly match the size of her own. She would like to read interesting books and have erudite conversations but unfortunately she is drastically dull and the only things she has to rely on are her looks and the money her relationship affords her.

Guillaume thinks that chain smoking, brooding in silence, and acting like a total prick is edgy and cool. Vedrana thinks that staring into the camera from a blank background, usually a wall, is high quality eroticism and we should all fall at her feet in awe because of it. Both are wrong.

And so, we have the entirety of the ninety-one minutes of Whenever I’m Alone With You.

Described meta-narratively as not a romantic comedy, but then in the titles as a romantic comedy, we are challenged by Guillaume to enjoy Whenever I’m Alone With You for what it is and not what our pre-conceived expectations want it to be. There are a lot of apologies in the opening monologue about the film not having the things commonly associated with a stable narrative, but these are really, ‘Sorry, not sorrys’ as Guillaume doesn’t really care whether you get his film or not. He rates himself as a true artist and therefore anyone asking for more than is offered must automatically be a philistine who doesn’t understand true genius. We are all beneath Guillaume and we must just accept that.

The problem with Whenever I’m Alone With You isn’t so much that its main characters are such odious people, it’s more that their play-acting at being lovers is so interminably dull. There are no laughs and barely a smile raised throughout the film’s entirety and listening to these two self-obsessed wannabes becomes challenging at best, and a giant waste of time at its worst. The things the characters get up to are typically benign and banal, and to compare the dialogue of romance here with something like Linklater’s Before Trilogy, it becomes tiresome and boring as well as diabolically absurd, just not in the way the filmmakers want it to as they try so very hard to be absurdist.

The first line of dialogue in the film is, “We should fuck,” which really tells you all you need to know. There’s titillation and enticing displays of flesh on offer to grasp at the idea of eroticism, but in amongst all of the empty conversations and trite usage of filters to colour the images, it all just seems a bit vapid and unnecessary. Throughout it all, cinematographer Nicolas Devienne tries very hard to show off the locations and settings as best he can, and to his credit he mostly achieves this, with some genuinely good looking shots and good use of lighting. However, he is constrained by co-directors Campanacci and Egon as they layer their own understanding of art on top of it, butchering the scenes with a variety of editing and narrative techniques that don’t work and add nothing to the feel of the film.

It can be hard to separate the characters from the writer/directors, especially when they use their own names and Campanacci enlists the help of his entire family to star alongside him. This obviously lends itself to the meta-narrative they are both trying to achieve with the film, as well as the arthouse style they are aiming for with the mashed up storytelling and extraneous interludes which lead nowhere. However, it would be a shame to think of Campanacci or Egon as anything like their characters in real-life, with the New Wave ideal seemingly taking precedence over everything the film and the characters have to offer.

There is at least a commitment to vision which makes Whenever I’m Alone With You stand on its own two feet, and while it can be said that there’s not much out there, especially recently, which looks like this, it cannot be taken that this is actually a good thing. By all means, go out there and make something different that we can all enjoy, but just remember to make it good while you’re at it.