AC
As Chianese
•In a nighttime and underground Paris, between techno music and clandestine dog fights, the personal story of Antoine (Guillaume Canet, already appreciated in "Vidocq" and "The Beach") unfolds, a young squatter who is as beautiful as he is impoverished, devoted to nightlife and alcohol. It will be precisely his desire to seek the secret of life in every champagne bubble that will get him into trouble: in fact, pretending to be a friend of the mysterious and gloomy Jordan (Gérard Lanvin, "The Taste of Others"), he enters a private party and soon finds himself dealing with a horde of vampires... Antoine is catapulted into a terrifying dimension where the beautiful Violaine (an Asia Argento darker than ever), Jordan's sister, seems to be the only lifeline to avoid sinking into horror... Antoine De Caunes' directorial debut is all about noir-tinted horror. Based on the eponymous novel by Tonino Benacquista, "Love Bites" is a cocktail (noir, detective story) of genres whose aftertaste inevitably brings us back to supernatural-tinted horror and the clash/encounter between vampires by vocation and those by choice, all filmed in the most varied climate of absurd unreality that sometimes descends into the most unintentional of parodies. Good intentions are countered by several sore points, starting with a screenplay - signed by Laurent Chalumeau - full of holes, as open to a thousand interpretations as it is to dissertations and directorial blunders (De Caunes could have easily inserted any cliché and any cinematic genre) shot with the haste and impetus of a novice. The film is little convincing and at times comparable to an action movie where, however, the threshold between the serious and the caricatured is fragile. The only appreciable role (and not just for patriotic love) is that of Asia Argento, perfectly at ease in the role of the dark lady with her big teeth; the sequence in which she gives herself to Antoine should cite Coppola's "Dracula" but ultimately turns out to be quite grotesque. Very little is saved (surely the photography of Pierre Aim) from this French fry mix that, in the wake of much better productions (Vidocq, Nid de Guêpes, Le Pacte des Loups), demonstrates more the opulent state of health of French genre cinema than its artistic quality.
