Mektoub my Love: Canto Due, a Kechiche that lives up to our (great) expectations (review)
Six years after the controversial Intermezzo, Abdellatif Kechiche gives a “real” sequel to his Canto Uno and still explores adolescent desires with the same sensuality but also humor. A success.
Mektoub is back. Abdellatif Kechicheweakened by a stroke last March, will therefore have had time to extract from his imposing material (hundreds of hours of rushes shot almost immediately after the first part in 2017) a Canto Due and thus cover his controversial Intermezzo (2019 – previously unreleased in theaters) which had seriously damaged his aura as a great filmmaker. Therefore, the quote from Fernando Pessoa at the opening perhaps indicates an idea of elevation, continuity and erasure: “Pass, bird, pass, and teach me to pass…” The human, this earthly animal, is condemned to mark the ground with his heavy footsteps. The power of the gesture would consist of capturing beauty in flight conscious of its fleetingness.
However, in Kechiche this beauty often materializes in an excess, as if confiscated by a staging playing on constant power relations. The traces left by Amin, Ophélie, Tony or Camélia, heroes of this Sète saga freely inspired by the novel by François Bégaudeau (La Blessure, la true), have of course not been erased on the pole-dancing bars of a nightclub (almost exclusive place of the narratively stopped Intermezzo), they continue to permeate the marine and sensual air of a stretching summer. September 1994. Nobody moved. The skin, the looks, the mouths, etc., are still there. Intact.
“What you call love is a trap… There is only desire and satiety…”, warns the actress of a 1930s classic that Amin watches on TV. We can take her at her word while considering that a reverse shot (counter-poison) is possible. The latter is embodied in the character of Ophélie (Ophélie Bau), a character with thwarted purity. We find her with her nose in the branches of an olive tree while picking. Smiling, free, lucid. Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) is the only one to understand her, to love her. Amin, as we know, is the lookout of the film, Kechiche’s double, he is the “bird” who “passes by”. He will soon be far away from here with his artistic projects. In the meantime, he is there, in an ultra-tight space-time that Kechiche never seeks to unfold. Desires remain in the state of promises. Kechiche or the subtle – perverse – art of delay. We are reminded in passing to what extent he is a great filmmaker of words, of the constant coming and going of words, of the photogenicity that emanates from the faces-action/emotion.
This Canto Due immediately introduces two new characters: an American producer and his much younger wife, actress in a famous soap, The Embers of Love. The latter would do anything to eat couscous (for Kechiche, appetite, like dancing, is a reaffirmation of her independence) Around the star couple buzzes a swarm that we (re-)recognize well. The possible graft between these foreign bodies and the “real” inhabitants of the film could be the subject of this sequel and cause it to change in nature. We would then leave the shores of this intoxicating emotional treadmill to finally get agitated, through more or less natural bursts of energy. The codes of the soap, as we know, require us to constantly energize the action, to look for explosive tensions…
The American actress (Jessica Pennington, real revelation of this Canto Due) pierces the frame with her excitement and her gluttony. A discussion about Amin’s film projects leads to a shift. In his scenario, the young boy imagined an impossible passion between a human and a humanoid with pre-programmed emotions. The producer is already imagining possible sequels. Amin doesn’t get carried away. The staging, yes. Kechiche passes through a mirror, enjoying the possibilities offered to him by a change in narrative regime. An “I” in the game. From this other shore, the world suddenly trembles, vibrates differently. Nothing could fundamentally damage it since Amin finally runs towards his mektoub.
By Abdellatif Kechiche. With Shaïn Boumedine, Ophélie Bau, Salim Kechiouche… Duration: 2h20. Released December 3, 2025
