Knowledge about Goethe among many Chicagoans is limited to the old story about the proverbial driver of the Clark Street bus, who would shout out “Go-thee!” and then mutter under his breath, “Gher-ta.” That is about as much as you need to know to enjoy “Young Goethe in Love,” just as you needed little knowledge of the Bard to enjoy “Shakespeare in Love.” Here is a tempestuous romance involving a misbehaving young man who only at the end brings forth a literary masterpiece and becomes a Great Artist. You need know nothing about his work while watching this movie because it hadn’t been written yet.

Why then, make this movie? I imagine its primary target was the audience in Germany, where Goethe enjoys popularity second only to Shakespeare. I imagined of a set of books I had as a child about the childhoods of famous Americans. Each book climaxed just as the hero was picking up steam. George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, and the rest was history. No matter, because “Young Goethe in Love” is a delight on its own terms, even if it has little to do with the real Goethe; here is a randy young man not a million miles apart from Tom Jones.

Goethe is played by Alexander Fehling, a young actor who I suspect will cross over into international stardom. His Goethe is feckless, carefree, mischievous, and not a happy camper in law school. He fancies himself a poet. He fails his examination for his doctorate while providing an answer to an oral exam that proves only that he can speak. He lives in the provinces to begin with, but is banished by his angry father even more deeply into the sticks, where in the town of Wetzlar, he’s placed in an apprenticeship under Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu), the stern local prosecutor.

Goethe is miserable in the practice of law and convinced he is doomed to obscurity. He is rescued from his blues by his new roommate, Wilhelm Jerusalem (Volker Bruch), who persuades him to budge himself from gloom and attend a local dance, where the lad is enchanted by the saucy Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein). He pursues her with great ardor, and she returns his feelings. They engage in a great deal more rumpy-pumpy than you usually see in films about towering literary geniuses; passion overtakes them and they respond on the spot, disregarding rain, mud and the risk of discovery.

Alas, Lotte’s father is respectable but poor, and hopes to marry her off to none other than Kestner, Goethe’s boss. This Kestner is not a bad man, but he is no Goethe, although at the time Goethe wasn’t, either. The triangle leads to misery, a duel and a great deal of trouble. The film’s ending is happy only in a technical sense. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose Lotte?

I learn that a great deal of “Young Goethe in Love” is fiction. It’s a film with boundless energy, filmed in sunny pastoral settings, gloomy interiors and with authentic-looking sets and costumes. I imagine Goethe himself, an uber-romantic, would enjoy it immensely, although he might not realize it was about himself.

Alain Corneau‘s “Love Crime” is a diabolical mystery movie with one of those plots where we suppose we understand everything that’s happening, and then get the rug pulled out from under us. It’s a contest of will between two women executives in the French headquarters of an American multinational, and involves bloodthirsty office skullduggery and intrigue. The two lead performances make it work, even if the plot eventually seems devious for its own sake.

Kristin Scott Thomas, once again fluently bilingual, plays Christine, the boss, who is one step away from being promoted to the American office. When we first see her with Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier), they’re in Christine’s home working on business while Christine’s affection for her protege shows hints of being more personal. Is she really attracted to the younger woman, or just trying to seduce her loyalty? She speaks tenderly, touches her gently, gives her a scarf.

When Isabelle discovers she also has taken credit for her work, she’s stunned. Christine smoothly explains that it’s the way corporations work; it’s known as teamwork. Isabelle seems to be a naive and vulnerable underling, compared to Christine’s cold-eyed calculation. Intrigue deepens as Christine sends her lover, Philippe (Patrick Mille), with Isabelle on a business trip to Cairo, they sleep together and that triggers Christine’s fury against them both.

The screws tighten. Philippe is trapped. Now Isabelle feels betrayed by both. A friendly colleague opens her eyes to office secrets, setting in motion a labyrinthine plot in which the seemingly naive young woman turns out to be more than the equal of her boss.

Spoiler: I must reveal that Christine is murdered. I won’t say who does it. Isabelle is arrested and brought before a conscientious magistrate, and the police assemble a damning case against her, all based on circumstantial evidence. Demoralized by pills, deeply depressed, Isabelle confesses. But then the whole plot turns on itself.

One of the pleasures is watching the gears mesh. The screenplay has been written by Corneau and Nathalie Carter with meticulous attention to detail. Like classic mystery authors, they play fair, so that the surprises at the end are consistent with what we’ve seen — although we didn’t realize it at the time.

Kristin Scott Thomas is good at roles like these, with a combination of sensuality and ruthlessness. Her fluency in the language has given her a new career as a French star, at a time when French filmmakers are more interested than Americans in middle-aged women. The movie depends, however, on Ludivine Sagnier, who is convincing both in early scenes when she’s helpless and clueless, and later when she holds the cards and pulls the strings.

This is the final film by Alain Corneau, who died last year at 67. His best film was “Tous les Matins du Monde” (1991), which starred Gerard Depardieu in one of his best performances as a regretful old musician. He also directed a favorite of mine, “Fear and Trembling” (2003), which also involved two women in competition. “Love Crime” is equally involving.

“A Love Affair of Sorts” answers the question of whether you can make a feature film with a Flip camera and leaves open the question of whether you can make a good one. It’s a shaky-cam meander through an unconvincing relationship, with detours considering the process of making the film. At 91 minutes, it seems very long.

The stars are David Guy Levy, the director, and Lili Bordan. They share writing credits, al­though much of the film seems un­written. He plays “David Guy” and she plays “Enci,” so it’s not a documentary, but I imagine these characters are not a million miles apart from the actors in real life. He is a pudgy geek, likable and low key, with an almost hostile taste in T-shirts. She is an attractive Hungarian-American. They live in places their characters don’t seem able to afford.

They meet when he Flipcams her shoplifting. He persuades her to take another Flip so they can collaborate on a film. It’s a good question whether he intends this as a project or a pickup technique. She agrees, and the film is edited from their separate footage. There is much talk about where the camera is, who is on cam, what they film when apart, and so on.

There is also the snaky “love affair of sorts.” She kinda likes David, but we meet Boris (Ivan Kamaras), the testosterone engine she’s sleeping with. A woman like her should have better taste than to date a man who wears a gigantic watch on one arm and a studded wristband on the other. The movie’s dramatic highlight is when she discovers he left the camera pointed at the bed while they were preparing to make love. Yes, but after all, it’s her camera.

David takes her to lunch and dinner; he has excellent taste in Formica diners. They go for walks. They talk a lot. They grow fond. He entertains either illusions or delusions of romance. She smokes all the time, with a certain style, and decides to stop smoking. That is the other dramatic high point. If Boris is the “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” type, David is more like “wh … wh … wh …”

And that’s it. The movie lacks a purpose other than its own existence. It is largely about filming itself. David’s friend named Jonathan Beckerman appears and apparently doesn’t know he is in a movie. So what difference does that make? There could possibly be an interesting story here about David and Enci, but that would involve imposing narrative and stylistic discipline. It could be filmed with a Flip, but why? Better cameras are also cheap. The movie’s lasting contribution is to serve as an illustration of sub-mumblecore.

If more fascists slept with Baya Benmahmoud, there would be fewer fascists. That is her theory, anyway, and a good many fascists allow her to test it during “The Names of Love,” a wacky French satire about the supercharged political climate in France. Baya (Sara Forestier) is the child of a gentle Algerian father and a fervently political French mother. Sexual abuse by her childhood piano teacher has inspired her, somewhat obscurely, to use sex as a weapon of political persuasion.

“The Names of Love” swims in the waters of French politics, which are a good deal more diverse than our own, spanning communists on the left and neo-fascists on the right. The Socialist Party of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in this company, is close to the center. Baya’s evangelical recruitment is further eased by her freedom in defining “fascist,” which for her seems to embrace anyone even slightly shy of the activist left.

The movie centers on her love affair with Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), a studious specialist in the diseases of birds. She meets him after breaking into a talk show he’s on. After a first sexual encounter leads nowhere, she breaks the news to him: She always sleeps with men on a first date. Furthermore, as a sincere Socialist, he is not quite left-wing enough for her tastes.

Their star-crossed affair develops in an ingenious story structure by director Michel Leclerc and his co-writer, Baya Kasmi. We meet Baya and Arthur as children, and then in (adult) voiceovers, they explain their ancestral backgrounds. These children rematerialize from time to time to discuss developments with their adult selves.
Arthur’s Jewish mother, Annette (Michele Moretti), escaped the Holocaust, which claimed her family, by being hidden under a non-Jewish name in an orphanage. Neither Arthur nor his Catholic father, Lucien (Jacques Boudet), ever, ever, reveal her Jewish background — not even to Arthur, who has apparently been named after a popular brand of washing machines.

Baya’s father, Mohamed (Zinedine Soualem), is a non-religious Algerian immigrant who is a brilliant artist but too modest to admit it; he works as a paid and sometimes voluntary Mr. Fix-It who is forever setting things right again. Her mother, Cecile (Carole Franck), grew up as a French leftist and married Mohamed in part out of political conviction of a milder sort than that adopted by her daughter.

So we have a hero who doesn’t “seem” half Jewish, and a heroine who doesn’t “seem” half Arab, engaged in a love affair that brings them and their parents into contact with the past. Sometimes this leads to dark humor. Arthur, for example, is reluctant to introduce Baya to his parents because talking with his mother is like tip-toeing on eggshells. She’s so sensitive that any reference to her past is likely to inspire anxiety and despair. When Arthur and Baya finally do have a meal with the Martins, Baya is warned to make no reference whatever to anything remotely suggesting the Holocaust, and of course her subconscious mercilessly generates such words as “oven” and “camp.”

This scene is funny in concept but not so funny in execution. That’s sort of the whole story of “The Names of Love.” We see it’s a comedy, we appreciate the satire, but our laughter is easily contained. What I admired was the story of these characters themselves. What an odd couple. An intent scientist and a wild child half his age. A straight arrow and a sexual predator. A neatly buttoned-up man and a woman whose blouses and sweaters have a way of spontaneously revealing her breasts.

So free is Baya with her body, indeed, that after receiving an urgent phone call, she pauses long enough to put on her shoes but neglects to put on anything else before rushing out into Paris and onto the Metro completely nude. This results in a predictable scene of a Muslim couple being offended; it might have been funnier if a couple her age had said “far out!” in calling her attention to her undress.

Sara Forestier is uninhibited in the role and has great comic energy. She won the Cesar for best actress for this performance. She makes a good contrast with Jacques Gamblin’s dutiful, responsible Arthur. What a fate, to be separated from his real name and given the name of a washing machine. Imagine an American named Facebook Martin. I enjoyed this film. I know I was intended to laugh more. It didn’t bother me that I didn’t.

Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone