Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • Tell No One

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ne le dis à personne

    Guillaume Canet (2006)

    Alexandre Beck and his wife Margot go skinny-dipping one night in a lake in the Rambouillet forest.  (Years before, as childhood sweethearts, they carved a heart on a tree by the same lake.)  Margot swims ahead to the other side of the lake.  Alex hears her cry in the dark and freestyles frantically across the water – when he climbs out the other side, he’s knocked unconscious.  The action resumes eight years later.   Alex is a successful doctor in a Paris clinic for children.  We learn that Margot was never seen again, that Alex was accused of her murder but eventually released, and that the crime was pinned on a serial killer of women.   When the bodies of two men are discovered near the scene of the assumed crime, the police reopen their investigation.  Tell No One is about their and Alex’s attempts to discover the truth of what happened the night of Margot’s disappearance.  This crime mystery film was a big success both commercially and critically and won four César awards (including Best Director and Best Actor for François Cluzet).

    Guillaume Canet and Philippe Lefebvre adapted the screenplay from an American bestseller of the same name by Harlan Coben but if this had been a British or American picture it wouldn’t – in this country anyway – have received anything like the admiring attention this film actually did recxeive.   Tell No One – taut, slick and pretty conventional – might have been designed for English-speaking audiences who feel easier enjoying an essentially shallow entertainment if there are subtitles, especially French subtitles, to give it a touch of class.   There were moments when I wished even more of the film was in a foreign language.  Alex remembers the trauma of Margot’s disappearance and its aftermath in a sequence long enough for ‘Lilac Wine’, sung by Jeff Buckley, to play nearly in its entirety.   To a French audience, this probably works all right as mood music.  To an English listener, the lyric is almost ludicrously apposite to the events and state of mind that the song is illustrating.

    Some of the set pieces, especially the sequence in which Alex is being pursued by the police, are compelling, although the film isn’t particularly penetrating in terms of character study or development:  when Alex is led to believe that Margot is still alive, we get very little sense of what that means to her husband.  What Tell No One lacks in this department, it certainly makes up for in plot complication – but the way in which this is unravelled is hardly original:  a character will explain to another character what really happened and we get a flashback to it.   One thing I didn’t get:  in the early scenes Alex usually has a cigarette in his mouth but after half an hour he’s a reformed character.  How this chain-smoking paediatrician gives up the weed remains an unsolved mystery.

    Tell No One is well acted and, as Alex, François Cluzet (who occasionally suggests an untheatrical Dustin Hoffman) is especially good:  the sharp vigilance of his expressions seems to blur into a tired, stunned mask as the unbelievable series of events impresses itself on Alex.  Cluzet is particularly well supported by François Berléand as the police chief and Gilles Lellouche as the father of a haemophiliac child who feels he owes Alex a favour, and more than repays him.   Also with Marie-Josée Croze, Andre Dussollier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Nathalie Baye and Jean Rochefort – and, in smaller roles, Canet himself and Philippe Lefebvre.  The impressive editing is by Hervé de Luze.

    7 February 2010

  • Tamara Drewe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (2010)

    Tamara Drewe is pretty enjoyable, in spite of a lot.  Moira Buffini’s screenplay is adapted from a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.  The graphic novel’s source was Simmonds’ comic strip for The Guardian and the origins show in the screenplay.  There is a storyline but the first part of the film is weakly episodic and although Alexandre Desplat’s music suggests an accumulating comedy-mystery Stephen Frears doesn’t get much momentum going.  The two deaths that occur in the closing stages – of one of the main characters and another one’s dog – are incongruous with the dramatic proportions of the story and jarring.  Even if you quickly get (I didn’t) that this is a comic reworking of Far from the Madding Crowd, the setting – a fictional Dorset village called Ewedown – and moral satire are so modern they don’t ring a Thomas Hardy bell of any tone.  The rural settings, lit by Ben Davis, are lovely:  there’s next to nothing ominous or implacable about the landscape.

    The beautiful Tamara Drewe, who left the village to get a life and a transforming nose job, is now a successful journalist in London.  She returns to Ewedown to do up and sell a house owned by her late mother.  Andy Cobb, whose family worked the land for generations but were swindled out of the property by Tamara’s, has fallen on economically hard times and barely makes a living as a handyman.  These two went out together as teenagers, in spite of Tamara’s beak, and it’s clear that Andy still carries a torch for her but she falls for Ben Sergeant, a charismatic jerk who’s the drummer in a high-profile rock band.  Ben is Troy, right down to the Sergeant (it’s his dog that takes the bullet that the man took in Hardy).  Tamara is obviously Bathsheba Everdene.  Andy is Gabriel Oak, although there’s no suggestion in their happy ending together that he’s second best as far as Tamara is concerned.  It’s less clear that Farmer Boldwood has any equivalent in the story.  Surely not the vile local celebrity Nicholas Hardiment, a serial adulterer and writer of best-selling crime fiction, who lusts after Tamara; nor Glen McCreavy, an awkwardly wry American academic, on a sabbatical to write a Hardy biography and finding inspiration at the Ewedown writers’ retreat run by Nicholas – or, at least, by his long-suffering wife Beth, to whom Glen is increasingly attracted.   Glen talks a good deal to Beth about Hardy’s own marital problems and infidelity.  That resonates with Beth of course but she doesn’t chime with any character in Far from the Madding Crowd.

    I’m not suggesting that Posy Simmonds was under any obligation to translate Hardy’s novel in scrupulous detail but the tonelessness of the film may owe something to the half-heartedness of the source material – and the plotting is sloppy even for something with no pretence to realism.   A local schoolgirl called Jody is crazy about Ben; her friend Casey is Andy’s niece; they know Tamara leaves a front door key under the mat for Andy to let himself in when he comes to do painting and decorating.  There isn’t a good reason, once they’ve seen Ben going in and out of Tamara’s house, for the girls not to trespass sooner than they do; or for why, later on, since they keep watch on the place in the hope of a glimpse of Ben, it takes them so long to realise that Nicholas is visiting for sessions with Tamara.  There’s no suggestion that Stephen Frears and Moira Buffini are aware of the lameness of this plotting or want to make comic mileage out of it.   Tamara Drewe could be a lot sharper if the film-makers were more knowing in this respect and if the comedy was consistently, robustly black.

    Still, Frears is a very good director of actors and, although the performances don’t all fit one with another, everyone in the cast is worth watching.  Roger Allam, with his relaxed, searing wit, is excellent as the libidinous, lavishly selfish Nicholas and Tamsin Greig is funny and touching as Beth.  As her suitor Glen, Bill Camp describes with painful accuracy a man whose acute awareness of his social clumsiness helps make it worse.  As the title character, Gemma Arterton looks great even if she’s a shade too self-aware and not quite likeable enough for you to warm to Tamara, for all her fickleness.  As Ben, Dominic Cooper is a cartoon – his playing and Tamsin Greig’s especially don’t belong in the same film – but he’s very effective at that level.  Jessica Barden (cast as Liddy in the forthcoming Thomas Vinterberg remake of Far from the Madding Crowd) is exuberant if a bit over-eager as Jody; Charlotte Christie’s Casey is a nice foil.   Susan Wooldridge is splendid in a cameo as a county local, avid for Nicholas Hardiment’s books and indeed for the author himself.  On the whole, the actors embody their characters very well – none more so than Luke Evans as Andy Cobb.  I’d not seen Evans before the two-part BBC drama about the Great Train Robbery just before Christmas.   I was struck again here by his surprisingly inexpressive, almost constricted voice – surprisingly because Evans first broke through in stage musicals.  He’s a strong physical presence, though, and – both as Bruce Reynolds in The Great Train Robbery and in Tamara Drewe – emotionally convincing.

    13 January 2014

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