Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno

Name: Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno
Genre: Romance, Drama

France, Italy · 2017
3h 0m
Director Abdellatif Kechiche
Starring Shaïn Boumedine, Ophélie Bau, Salim Kechiouche, Lou Luttiau
Genre Romance, Drama

Amin, an aspiring screenwriter living in Paris, returns home for the summer, to a fishing village in the South of France. It is a time of reconnecting with his family and his childhood friends. Together with his cousin Tony and his best friend Ophélie, he spends his time between the Tunisian restaurant run by his parents, the local bars and the beaches frequented by girls on holiday. Enchanted by the many female characters who surround him, Amin remains in awe of these summer sirens while his dionysiac cousin throws himself into their carnal delights with euphoria. Armed with his camera and guided by the bright simmer light of the Mediterranean coast, Amin pursues his philosophical quest while gathering inspiration for his screenplays. When it comes to love, only Mektoub (‘destiny' in Arabic) can decide.

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What are critics saying?

IndieWire by Ben Croll

“Mektoub, My Love” is never about anything more than its own style.

The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij

Though it is convincingly played and sensually shot, the film has about as much narrative as the characters have parts of their bodies covered on the beach.

Variety by Guy Lodge

Another gorgeous three-hour study of young, attractively housed hearts in often turbulent motion, Mektoub is a frequently seductive sensory epic of equivalent ambition, yet despite its woozily pleasurable set pieces, the fraught emotions binding them are less urgent, and the perspective of its protagonist far less immediate.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

Mektoub titillates without ever delivering the up-to-your-eyes immersion that the filmmaker’s best work deals in, and after three long hours, nobody’s changed, nobody’s learned anything and no one’s grown any older, except the audience.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

Mektoub My Love is an often beguiling work, drenched in beauty and humour and an inclusive warmth.

Screen International by Lee Marshall

Kechiche has developed an almost unique ability to give surfaces depth through his manipulation of dramatic beats and a quality of empathy that seems built into the roving camera eye.