L’Alpe d’Huez Festival 2026: Macaigne and Calamy ask themselves What is love?

Filmmaker Fabien Gorgeart continues to explore the question that runs through all his films – how to create a family? – knowing how to distil a tasty humor, carried by a group of actors who are all irresistible

If proof was needed of the successful change in direction of the selection policy of the organizers of the Alpe d’Huez festival, here it is! A handful of years ago we wouldn’t necessarily have imagined Fabien Gorgeart in competition – this filmmaker not being particularly associated with comedy. Those days are over. Alpe d’Huez has opened up to different types of comedies and today, we can see in the same day, or almost, The Marsupilami And What is Love?

In this film, Gorgeart continues to explore the question that runs through all of his cinema since his first feature Diane has the shoulders. Namely: how to create a family? In 2017, this first film told the story of a young woman who agreed to carry the child of a couple of homosexual friends. Through the prism of GPA, Gorgeart looked at the revolution in family models in progress. In 2021, in The Real Family we followed a host family who saw the little boy they had welcomed at 18 months go back to live with his biological father.

And here is his third film. The emotion is still there, but Fabien Gorgeart has never pushed the comedy cursor so far. For this, he relies on an unexpected starting situation: Fred will ask his ex-wife Marguerite, years after their separation, to obtain the nullity of their marriage from the Church. His new companion, Chloé, a fervent Catholic, wants to get married before God and for that, he needs this precious annulment. Marguerite, happy to see him as a couple again, accepts, without suspecting the troubles they will have to face.

Gorgeart’s great quality is that he manages to find the right tone to deal with what initially appears to be a somewhat exotic formality but which actually allows him to deal with the flammable subject of religion. Subtle, the director draws smiles and laughter from us without falling into the easy anticlerical charge while showing, conversely, to what extremes the clerical authorities can go to obtain this nullity. But the film also ventures into the realm of the intimate and this investigation into their own past will bring back to the surface in the old lovers feelings that they thought had been extinguished for a long time. What is love? thus combines lightness and depth in a gesture of great fluidity despite the multiplicity of mini-plots that compose it.

But we are in L’Alpe d’Huez. And Gorgeart therefore excels in the art of situational comedy, managing to capture generations with great humor. As relevant in his description of adults as adolescents, parents as children, this generational waltz allows him to reflect on the feeling of love. From the first thrills of the heart to the hesitations and uncertainties that assail us when we thought we were sincerely committed to the rest of our lives… it is the variations of Love, the liberties taken by Cupid that the filmmaker examines.

And nothing would resonate with this accuracy without the quality of the cast assembled in front of its camera. Without the slaughter of Laure Calamy, the delicacy of Vincent Macaigne. We discover Mélanie Thierry in the character of a pious woman far from what she may have played previously; Jean-Marc Barr as a rigorous man of the Church; Lyes Salem very fair, just like Céleste Brunnquell and Saül Benchetrit, revealed by the series Tender fleshin his first major role on the big screen. Their complicity bursts through the screen. And we happily forgive a few small drops here and there to salute this hymn to living together, devoid of any cloying and demagogic ease.

By Fabien Gorgeart. With Laure Calamy, Vincent Macaigne, Mélanie Thierry… Duration: 1h38. Released May 6, 2025