What is Love?: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 6.3/10

What is Love? is a French comedy-drama that has a genuinely clever premise but fumbles the execution with uneven pacing and tonal whiplash that never quite resolves itself. It’s worth a watch if you’re patient with messy character studies, but don’t expect the film to deliver the emotional payoff its setup deserves.

What is Love?: The plot (no spoilers)

What is Love? follows Marguerite, who’s seeking a church annulment of her marriage to Fred because she’s built a new life with a partner and child—but here’s the kicker, the church requires both exes to testify that the marriage was fundamentally broken from day one. It’s a premise dripping with ironic potential, forcing two people to systematically dismantle their shared history while possibly recognizing why they loved each other in the first place.

The story unfolds as a retrograde excavation through memory, flashbacks, and uncomfortable conversations that oscillate between genuine tenderness and awkward comedy. Gorgeart’s film wants to interrogate what love actually means when institutions demand you erase it, but the movie keeps tripping over its own tonal ambitions and never quite commits to whether it’s examining heartbreak or mining it for laughs.

Acting & direction

Laure Calamy brings her trademark precision and wounded intelligence to Marguerite, making every deflection and vulnerability feel earned rather than performed. Vincent Macaigne as Fred is a trickier proposition—he’s often charming but sometimes too opaque, leaving you unsure if that’s the character or the actor hedging his bets. The supporting cast floats in and out without much gravitational pull, which undermines the emotional stakes.

Gorgeart’s direction is frustratingly inconsistent; there are sequences of genuine visual wit and atmospheric grace, particularly in the flashback sequences where he finds a lovely, muted color palette and lets scenes breathe. Then he’ll cut to a scene where the pacing goes slack and the comedy feels forced, as if he couldn’t decide whether this moment should land as poignant or punchline, so he splits the difference and achieves neither.

The strengths

• The central conceit—using church annulment bureaucracy as a lens to examine a dead marriage—is genuinely inventive and loaded with thematic richness that the film occasionally taps into brilliantly.
• Laure Calamy’s performance anchors the whole affair with a specificity and emotional honesty that elevates scenes that might otherwise sink under clumsy writing.
• The flashback sequences occasionally nail a bittersweet tone that feels authentic to how memory actually works—not as linear narrative but as fragments of sensation and regret.

The weaknesses

• The tonal shifts are jarring and never reconcile; the film keeps yanking you between romantic melancholy and sitcom hijinks without establishing a coherent voice or thematic clarity.
• The secondary characters, particularly the new partner and the priest facilitating the annulment, are sketched so thinly that entire scenes collapse under their lack of dimension or purpose.

Who should watch it

If you’re drawn to French character dramas and romantic comedies that prioritize conversation over spectacle, and you have patience for films that stumble while reaching for something meaningful, this is your lane. Think somewhere between Éric Rohmer’s philosophical messiness and contemporary indie romance—it’s a film for people who’ve loved the imperfect cinema of relationships even when the film itself doesn’t fully succeed.

Final verdict

What is Love? is a film that deserves credit for its ambition and gets significant mileage from Calamy’s magnetism, but it’s held back by Gorgeart’s inability to nail a consistent tone and a script that’s too busy being clever about the concept to do real emotional work with the characters. The movie’s 100 minutes feel simultaneously thin and overlong, which is never a good sign. It’s watchable and occasionally touching, but it’s not the film its premise promises it could be, and that gap between potential and execution is what keeps it stuck at a respectable but frustrating 6.3 out of 10.