Love Songs (Les Chansons d'amour) ***

Directed by Christophe Honore. With Chiara Mastroianni, Clotilde Hesme, Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier. Distributed by IFC First Take. 1 hour, 35 mins. No MPAA rating (sexual scenes, nudity and profanity). In French with subtitles. Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse.

Now is a good time to see a great movie face as it changes. That face belongs to 24-year-old Louis Garrel, and like a lot of the great French faces - Depardieu and Auteuil - the centerpiece of Garrel is that nose. The dark eyes and spout of a mouth seem to emanate from there. Most remarkable is the way Garrel's paleness almost constitutes a source of light; he has silent-movie skin.

Not very far into Christophe Honore's

Love Songs,

Garrel entertains a table full of people with his performance of deep emotions - "despair," for instance. The eyes flutter madly. The nose tilts up.

Honore could have made just as rapturous a movie by turning the sound down, but then we wouldn't have the pleasure of hearing Garrel, and the rest of the cast, sing. Their feelings are the point. If Ludivine Sagnier sounds dolorous when she sings to Brigitte Roüan, who plays her radiant mother, it's because her character, Lucy, is sad.

Well, really, she's confused. Lucy and Ismael (Garrel) have turned their couple into a threesome, comically making room in their bed for Alice (Clotilde Hesme), Ismael's bookish, asexual (that's her description, anyway) co-editor at a newspaper. Ismael tolerates the romantic expansion because it's what Lucy wanted, but all he really wants is her.

So just as things are looking unstoppably glum, Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, as a college kid (and Breton) with a raging crush on Ismael, comes to the emotional rescue. It's a long story, but his persistence pays off, for us at least, with a final shot that, as far as the movies go, is both audacious and romantically absurd. You'll laugh. You'll swoon.

- Wesley Morris, Boston Globe