Sparkling thriller with storytelling problems

Lucky it’s not appropriate for a review to reveal the ending, because summarizing this one would be an unusually tricky business. 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 (some of whom are up for Césars this year) 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. André Dussollier and Francois Berléand have good roles against type and 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 heartthrob 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. Do the French do it better? Sometimes. Corben says he’s very pleased with this. It does show they can outdo us at our own game and make it look fresh. But there’s that little problem of the plot….it’s ridiculously complicated with or without subtitles.

Alex Beck (Cluzet) is a pediatrician. On the eighth anniversary of the grim murder of his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), for whom his childhood love still burns undiminished, he gets a couple of e-mails showing her apparently alive and signed by her, “Tell no one.” Then evidence on two bodies dug up in the park reopen his wife’s murder case and make him a suspect. That’s hard to figure, since he was hit on the head when she died and was in a coma for days. His wife’s best friend Hèlene is a wealthy gay woman photographer (Scott-Thomas) who lives with Alex’s little sister Anne, a champion rider (Marina Hands), and Hèlene’s paying a famous attorney, Elisabeth Feldman (Nathalie Baye), to handle Alex’s case. It’s when she 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). A soulful hoodie type named Bruno (Gilles Lelouche) who owed Alex one for saving his hemophiliac kid provides payback by hiding the doctor. Meanwhile there are some nasties 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. Imvolvement of the lawyer, conflicting cops, and multiple subplots spice up the soup.

As a filmer of action, Canet shows in this second feature that he’s highly skilled, and this is also a touching love story; he’s got a lot going on. A bit more slicing and dicing of the screenplay would have given us a movie we could understand as well as enjoy watching. 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.

An excellent example of a film that has some serious flaws but is still fun to watch and dazzles in many particulars, Ne le dis à personne is up for nine Césars, putting it at the top of the French awards race along with Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley and Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory/Indigènes. It opened in Paris November 1, 2006. To be shown at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center March 2, 3 and 4, and March 11, 2007 at the IFC Center. No US distributor.

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