It's no secret – I'll watch Audrey Tautou do just about anything.  Swap her for Kate Hudson, and How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days suddenly becomes riveting cinema.  Yeah, it's shameful, but at least I'm upfront about it.  My debilitating crush also helps explain how I carefully arranged to see Tautou's latest film, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, at a film festival despite not having the slightest idea what the movie was about, let alone what genre it fell into.

When Loves Me started, it seemed like an Amélie rip-off, with Tautou playing another impossibly cute pixie doing impossibly cute pixie things to win the affection of a boy, only this time in Bordeaux instead of Montmartre. We first see her Angélique in a flower shop where she's purchasing a bouquet in honor of her anniversary with a man we later learn to be Loïc (Samuel Le Bihan, The Brotherhood of the Wolf).  While he's hardly an ideal catch - a married cardiologist with a pregnant wife - we assume Loïc must be a great guy, just because Angélique thinks he's the cat's ass.

Angélique, an art student, also creates a painting for Loïc and has that delivered to him at work.  Her best friend and café co-worker (Sophie Guillemin, With a Friend Like Harry) thinks Angélique is nuts for carrying on with a married man.  Ditto for a classmate named David (Clément Sibony), the moon-eyed boy who is clearly in love with Angélique but can't muster the courage to do anything about it (he even has a white-boy afro, just like the hopelessly moon-eyed Brian Krakow).

Then some weird things start to happen, namely Loïc standing Angélique up a couple of times, even though he's left his wife (Isabelle Carré).  Loïc is also accused of assaulting a female patient, who mysteriously turns up murdered the next day.  Before we get our bearings, Angélique completely loses hers, pops her head in the oven and kills herself.  This all happens in the first half of Loves Me, so don't think I'm ruining the ending or anything.

It's pretty shocking to have your protagonist killed off within the first 45 minutes of any film, not to mention one as adorable as our Angélique.  It's even more surprising when writer-director Laetitia Colombani (this is her debut) literally rewinds the entire film right back to the flower shop and presses "play" again.  At first, this seems kind of gimmicky, like Sliding Doors, because the easy assumption is that this time Angélique will do something slightly different and the ending will be much happier.  I won't say whether it is or not, other than the mere presence of Guillemin in a film is starting to guarantee that the hairs on the back of your neck will stand on end.  Don't leave until it's over because the epilogue is a real killer. Loves Me is one memorable trip, and, since it's being released Valentine's Day weekend, it might be the ideal anti-holiday film out there.

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