Les histoires d’amour finissent mal en général

Twenty-year-old Zina is an immigrant from North Africa, but of French origin. She is an attendant at a small theater in Paris, but she dreams of the stage. She adds to her low salary by working as a model in commercials, and Slim, Zina's fiancee, pays his studies by driving a cab at night. But then she meets the actor Frederic who is going to help Zina to get a part in a new musical.

COMMENTARY
The title is promising: Les histoires d'amour finissent mal en general. In English it translates into: Love stories usually ends in tears. It is touching because: 1) it is about love, 2) the love is an unhappy one, 3) the voice is personal, 4) it sounds chatty in a French way, 5) the message appears slightly absurd ... And that is precisely what the movie is like.
The story begins on a commuter train.
The main character Zina is on her way home from a boring job at the theater. Slim, the taxi driver who studies to become a lawyer, waits in a rented flat. They met by coincidence in the neighbourhood laundromat and are now planning to get married. However, the marriage is prevented from taking place, mainly because of a young actor, Frederic.
Les histoires d'amour finissent mal en general turns into a triangle drama, where Zina is torn betweelT Slim and Frederic. But the conflict is not only about themselves
as people. They also represent two different worlds with two different lifestyles. Slim represents the rational, the human who thinks before he acts. Frederic belongs to the dreamers, who will rather live in their fantasies than in reality.
Through his profession Frederic offers
glimpses of a different kind of life for Zina. Suddenly life with Slim appears too trivial and confined. Why couldn't she too become an actress, for example? The problem is that Zina is unable to choose, instead she tries to pick up the best of both worlds. A third alternative, free of men, is never considered. Zina's inability to choose is also the real theme of the film.
Director Anne Fontaine, who wrote the script together with the writer Claude Arnaud, says that she wanted to use the simplest technique possible. The desire to tell a story was the guiding point during the shoot, as well as the actors' personalities.
The aversion against conventional ways of dramatization is noticable also in the depiction of Zina's and Slim's Arabian roots. For once the problems of immigration do not dominate the portrayal of the characters, it is only mentioned through the subtext. Slim is ''beur'' and Zina is ''beurette'' (beur=Arab, pronounced backwards in Verlan, slang that grew out of the Paris Arab ghetto), but they could just as well be ''Frenchman'' and ''Frenchwoman''.
Only once is a point made of their North African background. In a row between Slim and Zina, Slim shouts, apropos Zina's would-be career in the theater, that she will only get parts as a maid. And Zina shouts back that he, he may think that his Arabic complexion will help him to become a lawyer ... The director's choice of two actors of Arabic descent, after all, has to do with clarity, according to herself. In France no group in society is so clearly marked by the conflict of assimilation/renewal as the Arabic. The same is probably true of Sweden, but that is another story ... ~,
Maria Österberg Ben Saad