GUILLAUME CANET IN NEXT TIME I'LL AIM FOR THE HEART

The banality of evil seen through a French serial killer

In his third feature Cédric Anger is working freely from a true story from the late Seventies about serial killer Alain Lamare (here called Franck Neuhart) who was a respected officer of the gendarmes involved in the search for -- himself. Shooting in drab sepias and grays, Anger slowly establishes an atmosphere of glacial chill. Staying close to the superficially bland split personality, played by the studiously innocent and blank-looking Guillaume Canet, Anger is understated, holding back the thrills even in murder sequences. Franck never has sex with his pretty victims: he mostly shoots them and tosses them out of a rental car, apparently repelled by the blood and mess killing them has made. The eventful yet numb first half hour almost bores us to death.

But gradually our closeness to the killer and the creepiness of his double or triple life -- besides gendarming and killing he's halfheartedly wooing his pretty cleaning lady (Ana Girardot) -- gets a grip on us and sends the chill down our spines. Franck is a strange individual, though the screenplay fails to convey fully the depth of the insanity that led to his lifelong confinement to a mental institution after apprehension. He mortifies his flesh with ice baths, whips, and barbed wire, disciplines that pay off when he has to hide for hours under water breathing through a reed. He takes a boy hunting and "donates" to him the forest where when the chase is getting near, he shows his teammates a parade of deer at dawn. Its' made clear he might have killed his girlfriend, his boss, or himself, had circumstances been right.

Is he gay as the police begin to think? He doesn't seem to like women. If his madness is under-shown, perhaps that's because he knew how to hide it. Anger's film, considered his best so far, might seem to offer little in the way of excitement, but its blend of realism and poetry is not far from the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, or one of Georges Simenon's "romans durs," this psychopath without any of the charm or panache of a Tom Ripley. Anger's focus on the criminal and those seeking him in the same person is unique.

A former Cahiers du Cinéma critic, Anger previously directed two other genre pieces (The Killer, The Lawyer), more recently scripting André Téchiné’s true-story drama, In the Name of My Daughter (also in R-V 2015). Ten years ago he collaborated in the development of Xavier Beauvois' touching police movie Le Petit Lieutenant.

Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart/La prochaine fois je viserai le coeur, 111 mins., debuted an Angoulême in August 2014, showing at other festivals, including Rome, Hong Kong, and Rotterdam. French and Belgian releases November 2014, to good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.7). Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its North American premiere, where it was screened for this review. This is one of two serial-killer films in the 2015 Rendez-Vous, the other being L'Affaire SK1. A review of Anger's film by Jordan Mintzer will be found in [Hollywood Reporter.

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