Lovers (1999)

Lovers is a love story which focuses on the difficulties of opening up to another person. Dragan (Sergej Trifunovic), a young painter from the former Yugoslavia, walks into a bookshop, and Jeanne, the woman behind the counter (Elodie Bouchez), decides to fall in love with him. The rest of the film is about the identity of Dragan and the Jeanne's worries about the relationship. Director Jean-Marc Barr, known as an actor from such films as The Big Blue, got initiated into the Dogma 95 film movement while acting in Lars von Trier's Europa. Lovers is the fifth film to carry the seal of Von Trier's Dogma manifesto, which mandates that films be made in a naturalistic manner, with hand-held camera, natural light, and no background music, among other restrictions; and it was the first one which was not made in Denmark. Despite its strict adherence to the Dogma rules, it is a Paris story reminiscent of the French New Wave. Lovers was screened at the 1999 Munich Film Festival.