by Hudson Moura
Mourad Winter’s Love Is Overrated is less a film about love than a film about the inability to enter reality. It follows Anis, around thirty, charming, funny, not stupid at all, but emotionally undercooked — one of those men for whom adolescence never quite ended because friendship, banter, and imagination offered a softer world than responsibility, grief, and coupledom. When his childhood best friend dies, that parallel world collapses, and the film quietly asks: what happens when the person who gave you permission to stay a kid is no longer there?
Anis is played with real ease and sincerity by the talented and funny Hakim Jemili (Winter clearly trusts him). He has that rare ability to swing from clowning to vulnerability in the same scene, so the dramedy register works: the humour never erases the loss, and the pain never kills the jokes. Anis is in love with Madeleine (Laura Felpin), but, as the title says, love is “overrated” — not because it is unimportant, but because it demands a relation to the real he does not yet have. So he performs. He invents, exaggerates, lives in a sort of soft-fictional version of himself — not quite lies, more like a parallel script that makes life bearable. Winter stages this not as pathology but as strategy: when life is hard to accept, you make it playable.
Madeleine, crucially, is a psychology student — which is Winter’s smart narrative device. She sees through him, but not to expose him; she wants to bring him back into the shared world, to get him to stop speaking in double meanings and emotional detours. Their dynamic gives the film its tenderness: she invests, he deflects; she insists on clarity, he hides behind humour. It is a very recognizable late-coming-of-age pattern.
What distinguishes the film is its cultural texture. Anis’s circle is mixed — friends from different backgrounds, different codes, different “non–politically correct” registers — and Winter lets the humour arise from that friction without turning it into a clash-of-cultures cliché. The jokes work because the characters know each other; it is complicity, not mockery. That makes the film feel lived-in, contemporary, and very much from the new French/Francophone generation that refuses to sanitize speech just to be respectable.
There are limits. Because Anis lives so much “in-between” — between fantasy and reality, between grief and denial — the film sometimes floats with him, instead of tightening the stakes. A few conflicts are resolved a little too gently. But the emotional core holds: Love Is Overrated is about a man learning that love is not overrated — it is just expensive. It costs truth, presence, and the courage to live in one reality at a time. 
Rating: 3.5/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 