Courtesy of Music Box Films

In “The Names of Love,” being released in the U.S. June 24, 24-year-old actress Sara Forestier plays Baya, a free-spirited idealist who literally enacts the 1960s slogan, “Make love, not war.” She is passionate to a fault in supporting the French left, lending her attractive body to the cause by converting right-wingers with sex rather than argumentation. For her performance — in at least one sequence she is hilarious in her nakedness — Forestier won a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

In keeping with its French title, “Le nom de gens” (“The name of people”), the names of the major characters matter. Baya’s family name is Arabic (Benmahmoud), whereas the male lead (played by Jacques Gamblin) bears the white-bread French moniker Arthur Martin.

Yet these two share an unsettled status as “half-breeds.” She is the product of a rebellious blue-blood French-Christian mother and an Algerian-Muslim refugee father with a heart of gold, while he has a Greek-Sephardic-Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust as a refugee child in hiding with nuns while her parents were deported and gassed, and a very proper (even prudishly straight-laced) Frenchman for a father.

Baya flirts with a secular-cultural version of her Arab heritage, while Arthur identifies as a rationalist and an atheist, but not as a Jew. Arthur is Baya’s unlikely love interest — unlikely more because of their difference in temperament than because of their difference in philosophy or their obvious age gap (at 53, Gamblin is 29 years older than Forestier).There is no clash between them over Israel, no echo whatsoever of the tension widely reported between French Muslims and Jews in recent years. This is a comedy, after all.

But unlike the boisterous Baya, letting it all hang out, Arthur is emotionally guarded, taking after his parents’ fascination with gadgets and technology as a way of avoiding deeper issues, such as his mother’s Holocaust-induced trauma. He becomes an ornithologist who specializes in investigating dead birds to ward off epidemics, which has the effect of distancing himself from human involvements.

Filmmaker Michel Leclerc admits to being inspired by Woody Allen’s comedies. This comes across especially in the clever and innovative ways that Leclerc reveals his characters’ childhoods and parental backgrounds. The film has a zany quality most of the way, but just at the point that it starts getting tiresome in its silliness, it becomes touchingly serious; and so it works.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Names of Love’:

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$90 $180

$360

Other amount