Love is never having to say I love you, goes the tone of "La Bande du Drugstore," a love story in which the couple meet in the beginning for about five minutes, and then proceed to spend the next 12 months obsessing about each other without actually getting together. Such a scenario might seem unusual in this day and age; with all that cyberspace communicating, there's practically no excuse for love birds to not get in touch.
But "La Bande" is set in France in the mid 1960s, when, if you wanted to say your "je t'aime," it meant getting hold of a phone (not such an easy thing to do back then), writing lengthy letters on chic notepaper or dictating a telegram at the post office (all scenes figure prominently in the movie and show how romantic engineering was so essential).
It was also a time when cool meant combining one's existential angst with British shoes, and enshrouding the whole package in billows of Gitanes smoke, preferably in a basement club like Drugstore -- a real-life bar on Champs-Elysee that was destroyed by a fire in 1972. Writer/Director Francois Armanet was obviously enamored with the bar and the period: The film masterfully re-enacts the particular ambience described in, say, the writings of Boris Vian or Jean-Paul Sartre.
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