In love with a daring story

At the ripe old age of 8, Sophie stops a near-kiss from her best friend, Julien, with the hard-earned romantic wisdom: “It will be easier if we just stay friends.” First-time director Yann Samuell’s “Love Me If You Dare” is the bittersweet story of Julien and Sophie, partners in a self-invented game of dare that helps her bear being the school outcast and rescues him from despairing over his beloved dying mother.

But this childhood mischief turns into a lifelong game of successively perverse and thrilling dares that bind and separate them, keeping both reality and their true feelings for each other at bay.

“Love Me If You Dare” (translated from the French “Jeux d’enfants,” or “Child’s Play”), which opens Friday in Los Angeles, was a top 10 hit when it came out last September in France.

Shot in 2002 for around $7 million -- a high budget for a first French feature by an unknown director -- it played at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals and won the John Schlesinger Award for Outstanding First Feature or Documentary at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

With its whimsical visual style, voice-over and child’s-eye view, the film drew surface comparisons with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s international hit “Amelie.” On the widely consulted and often wildly inaccurate movie website IMDB.com, Samuell is listed: “sometimes credited as Jean-Pierre Jeunet.”

“I’ve never even met him. I’ve never even talked to him. Or run into him!” Samuell says. He says the rumor started when a journalist joked that Jeunet might have made “Love Me If You Dare” under an assumed name.

Samuell, 38, went to film school but worked for 10 years as an illustrator before throwing out all his materials. He made six short films, including a fairy tale, a historic film and a political satire, and wrote several expensive-to-make scripts before writing a feasible first film.

“I realized that what I was best at was the relationship between two characters,” says Samuell, who is wearing a baseball cap atop his waist-length blond hair and whose friendly but sometimes halting social manner means that he laughs more than he probably means to. “I wanted to talk about love. And who was I? I was a child who had stayed a child. From the moment I decided the three things that I wanted to talk about, the story came to me very fast.”

A love story that turns the genre’s cliches on their heads, “Love Me If You Dare” is saved from melodrama one moment with a bit of twisted comedy and rescued from sentimentality the next by a knife in the heart.

“All the romantic comedies that I had been proposed before were the ones you’ve seen, that end in an airport with the guy running late in the taxi,” says Guillaume Canet (“The Beach”), who plays Julien as an adult. “Even if I like to watch those movies from time to time, I didn’t really want to be in one. There was a very cruel and cynical side to this story; it showed that love isn’t only happiness.”

Samuell, who lives outside Paris near the forest of Rambouillet, points out that he is the happily married father of four. “I believe in love, not to worry!” he says.

Samuell says he visualized every scene as he wrote it, painted meticulously colored storyboards and labored over post-production to get things to look exactly the way he imagined them. But he admits that he wasn’t always able to communicate his vision to the cast and crew. “I’m not a guy who’s easy to follow,” he says. “Sometimes I keep things in my head, and I have the impression that nobody understands what I’m saying.”

That impression was confirmed by the actors, who said Samuell’s reticence often left them feeling lost. “Yann is very complicated in work,” Canet says. “He doesn’t talk a lot, he’s not someone who explains himself. So we felt all alone sometimes.”

Marion Cotillard (“Big Fish”), who plays the grown Sophie, agreed. “It wasn’t always easy between us,” she says by phone. “He didn’t really give us the keys to his universe.”

But if the actors didn’t always know what was going on while making the film, they were dazzled by the result. “When I saw the extent of the visuals, I was very pleasantly surprised by all he didn’t tell me on the set,” Canet says.

“I realized that in fact he is very precise,” Cotillard says, “he just has a difficult time expressing himself.”

Nevertheless, the actors found his rehearsal methods ingenious: Samuell had them improvise with the children -- Cotillard with Thibault Verhaeghe, who played the young Julien; Canet with Josephine Lebas-Joly, who played the young Sophie. “It was really interesting because it allowed me to know the character when she was young,” Canet says. “So when I found myself across from Marion in those scenes, I had the impression of having known her as a little girl.”

Like all great unconsummated love affairs, this one keeps you guessing until the end, even as the protagonists’ ability to hurt and disappoint each other deepens alongside their unexpressed feelings.

Nevertheless, Samuell’s film gives viewers a choice between happy endings. “I wanted to keep it open,” he says, “because I don’t want to impose one vision. But oh yes, a happy end, no matter what! It’s not very well regarded in France, the happy end. I guess I’m not French enough not to have a happy ending.”