Friendship Without Love
Friendship Without Love is the story of two best friends Ramou and Delgado, who love the same girl – Miranda. As the voiceover at the onset of this amusing film claims, this is a story of friendship as much as it is a love story with revenge smeared over it just enough. A unique and wildly humorous plot executed with nothing more than a mixture of idiosyncratic gestures used as properties to every character to elicit little more than laughs from the audience. This film belongs in the pool of independent films which are determined to glorify the doings of ne’er-do-wells who despite failing at a conventional style of life, have something that tip the scales in their favour.
We have in this film a duo – Ramou and Delgado, friends who love Miranda at the same time and who are loved back by her with the same fervour and innocence. When Miranda’s father finds out about their love story, he decides to do all in his capacity to bring this relationship of three to a ruination. At a party thrown by Miranda, the two best friends are the ones left to fight at the dodgeball game, but to obviate a rift between them over a game Miranda calls the game a draw and everyone likes it except her father, Roland. He takes down the two friends when they are alone with a ruse to get two of them into a closet unaware of the other’s presence. When they are found alone together in the closet and probably kissed each other in the dark, Roland declares them gay in his daughter’s presence.
Inferring from Miranda’s reluctance to come back home to her father from Canada, Roland might have been successful in driving the three friends apart with his prank. Notwithstanding her unwillingness, Miranda agrees to come home when Roland poses himself as a victim of a chairlift accident during a video call. The story gets a little less humorous here, although there are still the amusing sound effects. We see that Ramou and Delgado have drifted way apart and are almost enemies with their own gangs. In DJ Billy’s party where everyone come together, Ramou runs into Miranda and she then finds Delgado dancing. When Miranda finds out about the little feud between Ramou and Delgado, she could not believe that best of friends could become what they are now. Roland gets into the picture and challenges the friends turned enemies to play the dodgeball which they have left 15 years ago to know which one of the two actually deserve his daughter. With a chant- ‘It takes one to know one’- that is native to the two friends, they keep their enmity aside and teach Roland a lesson and prove that he fakes the chairlift accident. Three friends get back together and right into a love triangle again.
Friendship Without Love is just as silly as it is earnest. Romain Prouveur’s cinematography deserves all the praise, so does the editing done by Jérémy Pitard. The beautiful and colourful setting of a peaceful place in France was shown on the screen with such grace. It has complemented the quirkiness of the story and pushed it forward. It takes a very great care to enact a decent comic role that is oblivious to the seriousness of life and the cast lived up to the challenge. Sébastien Auger’s well organised and thought-out project has a promise of unconventionality.
