The middle film of the trilogy begins with a ménage-à-trois suspended by tragedy, and then turns into an examination of the power of grief to remake a circle of friends and loved ones. While Honoré’s films often delight in music and dance, Love Songs and its later counterpart, Beloved,come closest to being true musicals, synthesizing their maker’s interest in Godard and Demy, the twin godfathers of the modern French musical. By insisting on using the (mostly) untrained voices of his cast, Honoré keeps the numbers grounded in a way Demy did not. Meanwhile, these numbers—while sometimes shaded with ambivalence—are wholehearted in a manner that separates them from the knowing ironies of Godard’s use of popular song and dance. Created in response to a friend’s death, Honoré and his longstanding collaborator, composer Alex Beaupain, made this film to work through their mourning process. In many ways, the film is a musical autobiography in which the malleability of sexuality, love and desire is challenged by the fixed inevitability of death.