Movies Like Love and Magnets

Frequently asked about Love and Magnets

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• What do the fridge magnets symbolize in the film?▾

  The fridge magnets serve as the primary metaphor for Jeanne and Noël's failing marriage — rather than talking face to face, the couple communicates almost entirely through messages assembled from fridge magnet words. The French title 'Les Aimants' is a deliberate pun: as a noun 'aimant' means magnet, but as an adjective it means 'loving' or 'affectionate,' so the title itself captures both the literal object and the emotional state the characters have lost.

• Why does Julie secretly alter the fridge magnet messages?▾

  After moving in with her sister Jeanne and brother-in-law Noël, Julie recognizes that their cold, note-based communication is a symptom of a marriage in collapse. She begins rearranging the magnet messages without their knowledge in an effort to push the two toward genuine reconnection, acting as an unsanctioned mediator. Her motivation is rooted in concern for her sister, though her interference also reflects her own need to process the end of her five-year relationship.

• What is Jeanne's affair with Manu about, and does it end?▾

  Jeanne's extramarital relationship with musician Manu develops as an escape from the emotional distance in her marriage — Manu represents passion and attention that Noël no longer provides. The affair runs in parallel with Julie's secret meddling in the magnet messages, creating dramatic irony as Julie tries to repair a marriage that Jeanne is simultaneously undermining. The film uses the affair to examine whether a relationship can be saved from the outside while one partner is already emotionally elsewhere.

• Why does Julie return to Montreal at the start of the film?▾

  Julie comes back to Montreal after five years in Guatemala because her long-term relationship with her boyfriend has ended, leaving her without a home or clear direction. Moving in with Jeanne and Noël is a pragmatic necessity, but it places her inside a troubled marriage just as she is processing her own romantic failure. This parallel — her ended relationship versus her sister's deteriorating one — shapes Julie's compulsion to intervene and fix something she feels she can still save.

• How does the double meaning of the title tie the film's themes together?▾

  The title 'Les Aimants' works on two levels simultaneously: the fridge magnets are the literal communication device the couple relies on, while 'loving' (the adjectival sense) is exactly what they have stopped being toward each other. Director Yves Pelletier uses this wordplay to suggest that the characters have reduced love to a mechanical, object-mediated act — assembling affection out of pre-made pieces rather than expressing it authentically. Julie's interference with those same objects becomes a symbolic attempt to restore genuine feeling.