What is Mektoub, My Love about? Eight years since the first movie’s release––and after more than eight hours of Abdellatif Kechiche’s magnum opus––it’s still a question worth asking. The latest, Canto Due rounds out the trilogy with all the things we might expect from the series: there are beautiful young people, plates of couscous, shaking booties, lazy days spent by the beach, farm animals, and so on. Somewhat surprisingly, the saga also has a plot––with a start, middle, and end––yet to describe the Mektoub films in such terms would be like trying to explain the flow of a river by the pebbles that wash up on its shore. One thing we can say is that Kechiche, perhaps more than most filmmakers, is brilliant at understanding two of cinema’s key fundamentals: that a prolonged close-up can be a movie in itself and that no other medium captures hormones in flight quite like celluloid.
Canto Due promises all that while also being––and this may disappoint some readers––the series’ most modest installment. I say this having not seen the infamous Intermezzo (a now-mythical film that I hear will remain locked away somewhere in Pathé’s vaults until the money can be raised to clear the songs) but by all accounts, I’m in my rights to make the assumption. Canto Due has a sex scene, of course, but it comes late on in the movie and there are notable consequences for the people involved. It also has none of the whispers of un-simulation that saw a similar one in Canto Uno surface in less-desirable corners of the Internet––certainly not ones you’ll find hyperlinked in any review.
The most provocative, which allegedly lasts for 13 minutes, is in Intermezzo. It was also left in the final cut without actress Ophélie Bau’s consent––prompting a furious walk-out during the premiere in Cannes. That is exactly the kind of choice that‘s led some people to understandably disown the filmmaker, yet Bau is notably not one of them: the actress even attended the film’s premiere and Q&A in Locarno from which, due to a recent stroke, the filmmaker was absent. Given all that, it’s important to thread cautiously here, but I must say I find the whole thing impossibly alluring––both the films themselves (with their alarming combination of bacchanalian excess and self-importance, Dantean titles, and quotes from the Quran withstanding) and their tumultuous production. This is not least for the added appeal of an installment deemed too spicy for public consumption (one that, in a time of such little cultural scarcity, I’d almost rather stay locked up).
But we digress. Let’s just say if you have seen Canto Uno, you will recognize many of the faces here and know much of what to expect. There is the introverted Amin (still an underwhelming protagonist, but played with pleasant charm by Shaïn Boumedine), who has left medical school to pursue filmmaking and photography. There is his uncle Tony, who still looks like a combination of a ’70s matinee idol and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and who continues to be promiscuous around town. Amin also continues to hold a torch for Ophélie (Bau), who is now pregnant with Tony’s baby after their long affair, and who is still waiting for her soldier fiancé to return from abroad. The plot of Canto Due is kicked into motion with the arrival of Jessica and Jack (Jessica Pennington and Andre Jacobs, respectively). The former is a freckly, red-headed actress in the hilariously titled Embers of Passion who catches Tony’s roving eye; the latter is Jessica’s much-older husband, a Hollywood producer who agrees to read Amin’s sci-fi script as a favor after being welcomed in to eat, after-hours, in the family’s couscous restaurant.
That the daytime TV melodrama of that plot could fit easily into something called “Embers of Passion” is, I sense, certainly not lost on Kechiche. Most everything the director has released since Blue Is the Warmest Color has, in some way, felt like a preemptive riposte to critical backlash. Many of the reviews I read from around Canto Uno‘s release were quick to draw attention to this––the sense that Kechiche was doubling down on the accusations of misogyny that he felt may have caused Steven Spielberg’s Cannes jury to make the unprecedented decision to share the Palme d’Or between him and his two lead actresses (the then-young and relatively unknown Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, both of whom have whom have tracked back a bit on those claims in recent years). If that is true––and given that Kechiche allegedly sold his Palme to fund the first of these movies, I’m inclined to think so––can we possibly assume that Intermezzo was a case of the director tripling down after Canto Uno’s positive reception from more middle-brow critics? Or that Canto Due, the most conventional of the three, was his attempt to defy expectations again? It’s not not a theory.
The movie premiered in Locarno to a packed house, many of whom seemed to know what to expect: there was laughter in all the right places (if also for some of the American actors’ less-convincing line reads) as well as a palpable ripple of giddiness in the audience whenever the camera stalled on the middle area of one of the female actors. Kechiche’s raison d’être has not abandoned him (though again, it’s a little tempered this time) nor, in spite of the relative lack of nudity, have his other horn-dog tendencies. It’s easy to condemn Kechiche for this, but I sense these films are far more interested in the enticing possibility of sex than the act itself––and in a way that feels more profound to me than merely edging.
Kechiche opened Canto Uno with one of the most raunchy scenes in the series but––as Peter Bradshaw accurately noted at the time––it effectively worked throughout the film as a kind of sense memory, something to carry with you during every flirtatious interaction that followed. And the Mektoub films, at their very best, provide a whole cinema of such moments. The most lasting sequence in Canto Due takes place on a beach, featuring Ophelia and Tony alongside the returning Uncle Kamal (Kamel Saadi, still big and booming) and another beautiful newcomer, Dany (Dany Martial), a waitress at the couscous restaurant, and her likewise gorgeous brother. Soaking up this milieu, with all its glistening bodies and illusory small talk, my mind wandered to the scene on the park bench in Blue Is the Warmest Color––the way that Exarchopoulos’s character desperately tries to play it cool during what she believes to be (perhaps correctly) the most significant moment in her life. Ah, to be young.
Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.
The post Locarno Review: Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due Concludes Abdellatif Kechiche’s Alluring Saga first appeared on The Film Stage.
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