The movie, which was made pre-pandemic, nevertheless is concerned with the issues about the limits of technology when it comes to keeping love alive. But more than that, it deals with the challenge of romantic love itself in a way that transcends the particular Paris-Tel Aviv storyline.
The gimmick that the film uses, which Ben Rafael incorporates into the movie gracefully, is that the entire film (except for a single key sequence at the end) shows the characters speaking to each other on screens, via Skype. What must have seemed like a clever idea in 2019 when the film was made now seems extremely prescient.
While the movie is meant to be a two-character story, one character is far more compelling from the beginning and that’s Julie (Judith Chemla), a young mother who works in the design field in Paris. She has a beautiful baby, Lenny (Lenny Dahan, who has an incredibly natural presence), and is married to Yuval (Arieth Worthalter), a French-speaking Israeli photo-journalist. They had a whirlwind romance and have decided to move to Paris but he has not received a visa and is living with his family and hanging out with friends in the Tel Aviv area. What could be just a hiccup in a healthy relationship puts extreme stress on their marriage. At first, it’s all Skype-sex and fun, as the two take their laptops everywhere and share virtually every moment of their lives. His family warmly welcomes her virtual presence at their Friday-night dinners. Yuval cannot see enough of his son. But cracks begin to appear in their façade of long-distance normalcy. Is he really doing everything he can to get the visa? Is he getting together with an old girlfriend? He also gets jealous of her Parisian social life. It becomes clear that she is under extreme pressure as a working mother with no partner to help her. Her own mother (Noemie Lvovsky) is a toxic presence and although she has friends, she seems to spend most of her time alone with her baby, as so many new mothers do.
Chemla, seen mainly in close-ups on screens, gives an appealing performance as a character who tries to cling to the image of her great love in the face of much evidence that he is not really there for her. It’s much harder to like Yuval and to empathize with him. As the bonds of their relationship fray, you root for him to pull himself together – and also for her to dump him.
I tend not to like movies about squabbling couples but The End of Love, which was co-written by Élise Benroubi, held my interest throughout and most people will identify with the characters in this story, even if they have never had to cope with a long-distance romance. It brought to mind Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road, the story of a couple, played by Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, going on road trips through Europe together at different phases in their relationship. While Two for the Road is a star-studded Hollywood drama, the essential story is so similar, because it’s universal: a great attraction turns into love but wilts when exposed to the realities of adult life and parenthood. There, Hepburn had the audience’s sympathy from her first close-up, much as Chemla does here.
Ben Rafael made a splash with her debut feature, Virgins, a 2018 film that won the Best Actress Award at the Tribeca Film Festival for its star, Joy Rieger. But that movie crammed together a mermaid story, a coming-of-age story and a dystopia plotline and was marred by shifts in tone. Here, she seems to have found her stride and tells the story with a beautiful visual sense, in spite of the limitations of the all-screen format. A mobile of birds that look lovely but are stuck inside appears in almost every scene and says as much about the couple and their fate as the dialogue.