- - ‘Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due’ Review: Abdellatif Kechiche’s Woozy Coastal Mini-Saga Comes to a Belated Close

Guy LodgeAugust 13, 2025 at 1:29 AM

Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival after being held six years in post-production limbo, Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due” certainly merits the descriptor “long-delayed.” Whether it’s long-awaited is another question. The third and (one assumes) final installment in the French-Tunisian auteur’s film series chronicling young love, lust and unrest in the rugged French port city of Sète in the mid-Nineties, “Canto Due” boasts some of the dissolute sensory saturation and narrative torpor that earned the two previous “Mektoub, My Love” films — 2017’s “Canto Uno” and 2019’s “Intermezzo” — mixed-to-negative reviews on the festival circuit.

That “Intermezzo” was a near-plotless vibe movie running over 200 minutes didn’t help its commercial prospects, though other factors were behind the cold shoulder it received from distributors — not least among them an off-set dispute between Kechiche and actor Ophélie Bau over the inclusion of a lengthy unsimulated sex scene in the final cut, and the director’s production company being declared insolvent. Between that unintended eight-year span between premieres and a combined running time approaching nine hours, the “Mektoub” project has wound up consuming an awful lot of time for what remains, by the standards of Kechiche’s best work, a fairly slight endeavor, offering diaphanous summery pleasures but little emotional staying power.

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The good news, for anyone still invested, is that “Canto Due” ends proceedings on a relative high. The shortest of the three films, albeit at a still-immodest 139 minutes, it’s also the most dramatically contained and compelling — introducing two outside characters to its gaggle of libidinous Sète locals, with consequences that escalate from ribald sex farce to life-and-death drama. The louche navel-gazing (to say nothing of other body parts lavishly ogled and objectified) in the preceding entries has been curbed to an extent. Even if nothing of particular import has taken its place, the result is balmy and digestible. Nevertheless, it’s hard to say what theatrical life it might have at this embattled stage in Kechiche’s career.

Though “Intermezzo” can be skipped at no great detriment to continuity, “Canto Due” will make little sense to viewers who haven’t seen “Canto Uno”: That film’s swirl of characters are mostly present again here, their various stories and backstories resumed with minimal explanation. The film’s leading perspective is again that of Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), a shy, handsome young man who, as detailed in the first film, dropped out of medical school to pursue his dream of becoming a screenwriter. Now, he’s back in his hometown after studying film in Paris, with a completed feature screenplay under his belt and no real idea of how to crack the industry. (That the title of his script is “The Essential Elements of Universal Existence” is some indication of how much he has yet to learn.)

Enter (again) his brash older cousin Tony (Salim Kechiouche, once more the film’s liveliest presence), a gregarious lothario who has previously acted as Amin’s wingman in matters of sexual conquest, though with limited success — Amin remains a passive, diffident figure, his desires kept largely to himself. With pushy enthusiasm, Tony appoints himself Amin’s agent. It’s a position that wouldn’t amount to much in Sète, if not for the fact that American soap opera actor Jessica Patterson (Jessica Pennington) and her older producer husband Jack (Andre Jacobs) are currently holidaying in the town, and are regular customers at the couscous restaurant run by Amin and Tony’s extended family.

In the grand scheme of things, the Pattersons are B-listers at best, though to the locals, they are pure Hollywood. During a standout setpiece at the restaurant — opened after hours for the celebrity couple, to the bristling resentment of the staff — Tony sufficiently ingratiates himself with the Americans that Jack agrees to read Amin’s script. Swiftly volleying between biting gossip in the kitchen and slick manipulation at the table, this extended scene represents the best of Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix’s writing, as well as the film’s loose, limber style of shooting and editing.

Somewhat improbably, Jack takes to Amin’s script, which he sees as a potential big-screen breakthrough for his wife, cuing a series of wine-fueled meetings at the couple’s luxury villa. Jessica humors this talk without wholly committing to the idea: Her interest is primarily in Tony, who appears to unbutton his shirt a little more each time they meet. It’s easy enough to see where this is all leading, but there’s breezy pleasure in watching it get there, before a hysterical finale that turns ever harsher and sadder. Meanwhile, the film’s other principal characters are left adrift. Farm worker Ophélie (Bau) was central to proceedings in the first two films, but this time merely broods on a dilemma already established in those entries: Months out from marrying her absent military fiancé, she’s pregnant by Tony, and needs Amin’s help to travel to Paris for an abortion.

Given this lack of closure, and the mostly diversionary nature of the Pattersons’ storyline, it seems “Canto Due” may have been conceived as a second intermezzo film of sorts, ahead of at least one further chapter — a prospect that now seems vanishingly unlikely. It’s hard not to feel, as this odd but not unenjoyable curio reaches its suspended conclusion, that we’ve probably seen enough: Wherever these characters head from here once this endless summer finally slips into fall, they won’t be lingering all that long in our imaginations.

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