How to enjoy being baffled

This star-studded movie directed by actor-heartthrob Guillaume Canet from Harlan Coben's best-selling thriller shows nowadays the French do taut fast-paced (American) crime stories in many ways better than Hollywood. Tell No One/Ne le dis à personne (which is fully translated to a French setting) begins with a group of friends dining outside a summer house. Then a couple, Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) and his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), drive to a lake for an evening swim. A look at a heart carved on a tree shows they've been sweethearts since childhood. It grows dark. A little quarrel, and Margot swims off. Then Alex hears her cry for help. He swims after her to the other side of the lake--and is knocked out. The screen goes black.

Cut to eight years later. It's the anniversary of the grim murder of Margot, attributed to a jailed serial killer. Alex's childhood love still burns undiminished, and if it weren't for his friendship with Hèlene, a wealthy gay woman photographer (Kirsten Scott-Thomas) who lives with his little sister Anne, a champion rider (Marina Hands), this mild-mannered pediatrician would be cut off from social life now. Hèlene urges Alex to stop celebrating this morbid anniversary and move on.

But he soon has reason not to. Checking e-mails at his office he gets a couple with a link to a surveillance camera showing Margot in some crowded place in real time, apparently alive, the message signed by her, "Tell no one."

While this has Alex in a turmoil, evidence on two bodies dug up in the Rambouillet woods nearby where he lives and Margot died reopen his wife’s murder case and make him a suspect again.

Soon Alex is running from the law and mysterious heavies, suspected of all sorts of foul play, with the old murder called into question--even though Alex's involvement is hard to figure, since he was hit on the head when she died and was in a coma for days. Hèlene hires a famous attorney, Elisabeth Feldman (Nathalie Baye), to handle Alex’s case. It’s when Feldman tips him off that he’s about to be arrested that Alex jumps out a hospital window and sets the cops on a breathless, well-filmed chase that includes running across the Périférique (Paris beltway) through heavy traffic and dodging the cops in a crowded market district. A soulful hoodie type named Bruno (Gilles Lelouche) who owed Alex one for saving his hemophiliac kid provides payback by hiding the doctor. Meanwhile the heavies are going to work on Alex’s friends and a lengthy confession is partially captured by a wired Alex when a sympathetic inspector Eric Levkowitch (François Berléand) backs him up. Involvement of the lawyer, conflicting cops, and multiple subplots spice up the soup, which also includes Alex's late father. What's really been going on remains unrevealed till the end, as in any good mystery. Harlen Coben's story provides all the raw material to keep you guessing and glued to the screen.

As a filmer of action, Canet shows in this second feature that he’s highly skilled and an entertainer, and this is also a touching love story; he’s got a lot going on.

So much so, in fact that if you really walk out of the theater understanding it all, you're a lot better than I am. A bit more slicing and dicing of the screenplay might have given us a movie we could understand better so we could enjoy the plot as much as we enjoy the action--but the French film, transferred to the Parisian-region locale, still appears to be quite faithful to the intricacies of the book's plot, from what I'm told, though there may be some ambiguities at the end that did not exist in the bestseller. Interesting that not only has Canet worked many of his favorite actors into the cast, he’s woven his own background into the story, since when young he, like some of the main characters, lived outside Paris and had a promising equestrian career. Several actors among the well known headliners, notably André Dusollier and François Berléaud, play amusingly against type, added fun to watch for those who know their usual work. But you don't have to have an intimate knowledge of current French cinema to enjoy the many nice performances.

Lucky it’s not appropriate for a review to reveal the ending, because obviously I'd have a hard time summarizing its elaborate twists and turns. Maybe it might help to read the Harlan Coben bestseller Canet and Philippe Lefebve adapted for this film, and if so, good luck. Or you can enjoy the excellent cast and consider the plot mere baroque ornamentation, like The Big Sleep’s. Francois Cluzet’s understated performance in the lead, which another actor might have spoiled with tears and shouts, is a pleasure to watch. He’s a classic everyman and easy to identify with. Besides André Dussollier and Francois Berléand, Nathalie Baye and Jean Rochefort and Kristen Scott-Thomas are further examples that the director is well-connected in the French acting world. Canet himself is only 34 but has played many roles and is a bit of a matinee idol in France. Just for fun, he plays the most disgusting character in this story, which has violence and chases and surprises to beat the band. The French, unlike Hollywood, aren't all wrapped up in superstars and CGI, which would only distract. This shows they can outdo us at our own game and make it look fresh. Auther Corben says he’s very pleased. But there’s that little problem of the plot….it’s ridiculously complicated with or without subtitles. There's just a bit too much to absorb in the allotted 126 minutes.

An excellent example of a film that has storytelling flaws but is still fun to watch and dazzles in many particulars, Ne le dis à personne got nine nominations for Césars and won four, for Best Actor for Chabrol regular François Cluzet, Best Director to Canet, Best Editing to Hervé de Luze and Best Music Written for a Film for Mathieu Chedid. Over a year and a half from its French debut it's showing to warm US audiences in selected US theaters. There is a DVD from Canada and Netflix will have it, possibly reissued here as a follow-up to Music Box Films' US theatrical release.

I saw this originally in the 2007 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Now showing in 19 theaters in the US, including two in the SF Bay Area.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.