French Lover (2025)

When French Lover premiered in September 2025, it arrived at an interesting moment for romantic comedies in cinema. The genre had spent the previous decade mostly dormant in multiplexes, relegated to streaming services and smaller releases. Director Lisa-Nina Rives chose to resurrect it anyway, and what she created is a film that understands something fundamental about why we love romantic comedies in the first place—they’re not really about romance. They’re about belonging.

The premise sounds familiar enough: a jaded actor meets a struggling waitress in Paris. But the tagline—”She lives far from the spotlight, he lives for it”—points to where Rives finds her actual story. This isn’t about two people falling in love. It’s about two people living in fundamentally incompatible worlds trying to find a bridge between them. That tension, played out across a 122 minutes-minute runtime, gives the film whatever weight it carries.

Omar Sy takes on the role of the famous actor, and he’s spent enough of his career playing charming characters that he understands how to undercut that charm. There’s weariness in the performance—the exhaustion of someone who’s given so much of himself to public consumption that he’s not sure who he is privately anymore. Sara Giraudeau, playing the waitress, has the harder job. She needs to make someone genuinely appealing who exists primarily through absence—no social media, no ambition for fame, just someone trying to get through the day. She manages it, though the script sometimes doesn’t help her much. Pascale Arbillot rounds out the cast in what amounts to a supporting role, but actors of her caliber tend to elevate whatever they’re in.

The film earned a 6.1/10 rating from 215 votes on release, which places it squarely in “competent but unremarkable” territory for most audiences. That’s probably fair. There’s nothing revolutionary here. But there’s also something the film does quietly well: it actually likes its characters. Rives doesn’t judge the actress for wanting fame or the waitress for avoiding it. She presents both as valid ways of existing, which is rarer in cinema than it should be.

What makes this film worth examining is where it sits within the broader recovery of romance as a genre. French productions pulled at the international box office in 2025, with growth driven significantly by animation and co-productions. French Lover isn’t an animation, but it is a production partnership—Zazi Films, Federation Studios, and Korokoro collaborated on it—which reflects how contemporary filmmaking works. No one studio or producer has enough confidence in a romantic comedy to greenlight it alone anymore. You need multiple partners to distribute the risk.

What’s interesting is that audiences seem to still want these stories, even if the industry isn’t sure how to market them. The film found its audience in France particularly, where there’s still an appetite for romantic stories that aren’t afraid to be dramatic. The tension between the public and private self, between who we are for cameras and who we are in quiet moments with someone we love—that’s a real conflict worth exploring.

Rives’ direction is straightforward. She doesn’t layer the film with unnecessary complexity or try to reinvent the wheel. She sets scenes in Paris but doesn’t make the city a character in itself, which is a choice some directors might push back on. Instead, the city is just where these two people happen to collide. There’s something refreshing about that restraint. The film trusts its actors and its story to carry weight without visual flourishes or overstuffed soundtracks demanding you feel things.

The supporting cast, particularly Arbillot, helps ground the film in specificity. These aren’t archetypes—they’re people with their own complications. The script gives them space to breathe, which matters in a film that’s largely about quiet moments and conversations. A romantic comedy lives or dies on chemistry and dialogue, and French Lover understands this.

If the film has a legacy, it might be as a small example that romantic comedies don’t need to be reinvented—they just need to be made with sincerity. There’s no irony here, no winking at the audience about how outdated the genre is. Rives makes her film with the same respect a prestige drama would receive, and that confidence is noticeable.

The film arrived to mixed critical response but found defenders who appreciated what it was attempting. In a landscape increasingly dominated by franchise films and streaming originals, French Lover represents a kind of endangered cinema—the mid-budget, grown-up romantic story shot for theatrical release. Whether it influences future films remains to be seen, but it exists as proof that filmmakers still want to tell these stories, and audiences still want to watch them. Sometimes that’s enough.