Charlotte Gainsbourg and Chiara Mastroiani…sisters in love with the same man.
“3 HEARTS” My rating: C+
106 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
The human heart is a tremendously fickle organ, at least in Benoit Jacquot’s “3 Hearts,” a heavy-sighing melodrama about a soulful taxman torn between two sisters.
Marc (Benoit Poelvoorde) has missed the last train to Paris. He asks a woman he encounters on the street — she is played by the ever-blue Charlotte Gainsbourg — to suggest a decent hotel in this provincial burg.
But the two spend the entire night walking and talking, and by sunrise they have agreed to meet at a prearranged time in a Paris park.
The screenplay by Jacquot and Julien Boivent doesn’t make it easy for them. For starters, the two potential lovers fail to exchange their names and phone numbers. It’s an early sign that this movie may not be unfolding in the same world the rest of us live in.
And when they fail to rendezvous (he’s delayed by a tax audit with a couple of Chinese businessmen who speak no French) the woman — her name is Sylvie — takes the train back home. Her marriage is shaky, but she nevertheless follows her husband to a new job in the U.S.A.
A few weeks later Marc is back in town on business and is approached at the tax office by Sylvie’s sister Sophie (the eternally sad-eyed Chiara Mastroianni). She needs advice regarding her family’s antique store.
Wouldn’t you know it? She falls for Marc. Before long she has left her husband, married Marc, and started a family.
Butler's Cinema Scene 