Monthly Archives: February 2026

  • The Crime is Mine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mon crime

    François Ozon (2023)

    Stage curtains on the screen open to start the film, and close to end it.  The final scene takes place in a Paris theatre, where two of the main characters are performing.  Several others, in the auditorium, rise to applaud as the two actresses played by Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Isabelle Huppert take their curtain call.  The standing ovation for the pair is well deserved, but the whole cast of The Crime is Mine should take a bow.  Ditto the writer-director of this feminist crime comedy and cunning period piece, François Ozon.

    At the parting of the stage curtains, Ozon’s camera stations itself outside a handsome house in Neuilly.  An altercation is heard from within – a man’s raised voice, female shrieks, gunshot.  A young woman emerges from the house, hurrying to get away.  The camera just about manages to keep up with Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) as she heads back home – a rented attic flat that Madeleine, a struggling actress, shares with her friend Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), a recently qualified young lawyer.  Pauline’s clients are few and far between, but Madeleine will soon be one of them.  Inside the Neuilly house, a man lies dead – rich, famous theatre producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet).  Madeleine protests her innocence, but Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalès) discovers a gun in her flat, and convinces Gustave Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini), the juge d’instruction, of her guilt.  Madeleine is charged with and tried for Montferrand’s murder.  Her flatmate leads the case for the defence.

    Madeleine’s speedy walk away from the scene of the crime anticipates The Crime is Mine’s tempo throughout.  The cast deliver their lines at breakneck pace, too – and the performing style is decidedly theatrical.  This, in combination with farce-like plotting and the timing of characters’ entrances and exits, leads you to assume that Ozon’s film is based on a stage play – and so it is.  Mon Crime, by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, was first staged in Paris in 1934.  Since then, the play has inspired two Hollywood adaptations – True Confession (1937) and Cross My Heart (1946) – but not, it seems, any French screen version before this one.  Ozon retains the play’s mid-1930s setting (as well as its title) but he also tells the story through a #MeToo prism.

    Madeleine was in Montferrand’s house to discuss the possibility of a small role in one of his forthcoming productions.  He offered her the role in exchange for sex, and she said no.  Unused to being turned down, he tried to rape her.  A struggle ensued …  Self-regarding, buffoonish Rabusset is the first to mention, casually, the possibility of a self-defence argument – which Pauline uses to turn Madeleine’s trial for murder into a gender-political cause célèbre.  Pauline writes an impassioned speech for her friend to deliver to the court; Madeleine’s beauty and histrionic skills do the rest.  She’s acquitted by the all-male jury, to loud applause from women in the public gallery.  The trial and verdict do wonders for her acting career.  She now gets the lead in ‘Suzette’s Ordeal’, the play in which Montferrand had offered her a walk-on with strings attached.  Pauline, meanwhile, is inundated with new clients. They leave their cramped attic and take up residence in a swish hotel.

    It’s typical of François Ozon to turn gender politics into thoughtful entertainment.  The Crime is Mine is quite the balancing act.  Ozon doesn’t present Montferrand’s misuse of power as less offensive than it is, or the trial’s professional consequences for Madeleine and Pauline as less comically telling than they are.  (He also exploits effectively the enduring theatricality of French court proceedings, in startling evidence in two very different films released the same year as this one – Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, set in the present day, and Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case, set in the 1970s.)  He crafts a period film whose knowingness exploits what modern audiences find appealing in past-times screen stories without detracting from (what I guess is) the farcical form and energy of his 1930s source material.  The settings and décor (Stephanie Laurent-Delarue and Philippe Cord’homme) and costumes (Constance Allain and Pascaline Chavanne) are consistently ravishing.  Manuel Dacosse’s ingenious cinematography contrives to give backgrounds, indoors and out, the look of two-dimensional stage sets.  Laure Gardette’s editing reinforces the pace of Ozon’s storytelling.

    Another Ozon touch is the introduction of a queer subtext that he doesn’t push too far.  The two young women are firm friends but some of Pauline’s looks in Madeleine’s direction signal that Pauline, whose choice of outfits is somewhat androgynous, would like them to be more than friends.  In the luxury of their hotel suite, the pair take a bath together – a short sequence that (as well as referencing Ingres bather paintings) epitomises Ozon’s tastefully expressive treatment of this sexual aspect.  From the start, though, Madeleine has a boyfriend, André Bonnard (Édouard Sulpice).  The circumstances and development of that romance yield plenty more comedy at the expense of male sexual exploitation and mercenary patriarchy.

    André’s father (André Dussollier) owns a big tyre factory in big financial difficulties.  He refuses to subsidise his son who, rather than getting a job, intends to marry an heiress while keeping Madeleine as his mistress.  Once she becomes a wealthy celebrity, Bonnard fils changes his mind about who to marry but Bonnard père opposes the idea, because of Madeleine’s notoriety and, more important, the heiress’s dowry, large enough to rescue his ailing business.  André may be selfish and lazy, yet Madeleine, rather touchingly, loves him.  Combining that love with the opportunism that paid off so well in court, she returns to the house in Neuilly, now owned and occupied by Palmarède (Dany Boon), an architect who did very well financially out of Montferrand’s death, after negotiating some kind of deal with him shortly before the gun was fired.  Making understandable assumptions about men’s priorities, Madeleine first tries, and fails, to seduce Palmarède, who explains that he’s happily married.  But she succeeds in persuading him to invest some of his newly inherited wealth in the Bonnard factory.

    Madeleine’s visit to Palmarède is motivated chiefly by a new and crucial character who has arrived on the scene – as a kind of diva ex machina.  Odette Chaumette (Isabelle Huppert) is an actress, to put it very mildly.  She explodes into the film’s pastel palette in a long, black, fur-trimmed coat and black opera gloves, her abundant red hair topped off with a hat sprouting black feathers.  By announcing that she killed Montferrand, Odette threatens also to explode Madeleine and Pauline’s comfortable post-trial lives.  A star of silent cinema fallen into obscurity since the advent of talking pictures, Odette Chaumette, to her deep chagrin, now finds herself sidelined by a younger woman who has stolen her crime and acquired the fame that was once Odette’s.

    In maybe the most sheerly enjoyable performance of her illustrious career, Isabelle Huppert is visually and vocally spectacular.  As well as a Toulouse-Lautrec poster come to hyperactive life, Odette is a startling embodiment of silent-movie-star Norma Desmond’s riposte – in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), when Joe Gillis remarks that she ‘used to be big’ – ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small’.  Huppert’s astonishing delivery makes it an excellent irony that the talkies did for Odette’s career:  the rest of Ozon’s cast have been rattling off their lines but Huppert far outpaces them.   At first, Madeleine and Pauline refuse to pay Odette off to keep silent, so she heads straight to Rabusset to confess.  Even when she produces Montferrand’s missing wallet as evidence of her involvement, Rabusset insists the case is closed and advises her to confess to an unsolved crime instead.  Fabrice Luchini is the second fastest talker in the film, which makes his encounter with Huppert’s Odette doubly funny.

    The Crime is Mine is a dazzling demonstration of what normally are film defects – next to no changes in pace, theatre acting on camera – becoming, in the right hands, assets.  For this viewer, it’s even more remarkable considering whose hands these are.  I loathed Potiche (2010), Ozon’s previous attempt to reboot an elderly stage farce.  Watching Isabelle Huppert in Anthony Fabian’s Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022) made me doubt that this superb dramatic actor was cut out for comedy – her work in The Crime is Mine proves that I needn’t have worried.  Huppert is certainly the star of the show, but Nadia Tereszkiewicz is very fine, too:  soft-featured but increasingly tough-minded Madeleine is a thoroughly convincing comic heroine.  (Some year for French cinema, 2023:  soon after the release of Ozon’s film, Tereszkiewicz impressed again in Robin Campillo’s Red Island.)  As already noted, there’s not a weak link in the whole cast, which includes, as well as those mentioned above, Félix Lefevbre (the lead in Ozon’s 2020 drama Summer of 85), as another of the film’s smart young opportunists, a rookie newspaper reporter; and Olivier Broche, as Rabusset’s clerk, who has problems with his waterworks but isn’t as daft as he looks (or as daft as his boss is).

    In the film’s last act, Madeleine, accompanied by Pauline, pays a call on André’s father, charming and bribing him, with Palmarède’s money, to agree to his son’s marrying her – then admits that she didn’t kill Montferrand.  Relieved that his future daughter-in-law isn’t a scandalous figure after all, Bonnard also agrees to fork out some money himself, to pay off Odette Chaumette.  He does so readily:  he remembers Odette with pleasure from films he watched a couple of decades ago.  As a bonus, Odette gets a part in a hastily rewritten version of ‘Suzette’s Ordeal’:  the mother of Madeleine’s title character has been turned into Suzette’s elder sister.  The rewrite also gives the play a new ending:  a proxy for Montferrand dies from two gunshots – the first fired by Suzette, to resist sexual assault, the second by the real Montferrand’s killer, to finish things off.

    On stage, then, the sisterhood of Madeleine and Odette shares the homicidal glory and the audience acclaim; as Ozon never lets us forget, on stage counts for a great deal in The Crime is Mine.  (Even though Mon Crime scores higher for keeping plot developments up its sleeve, the film’s English title is apt and witty.)  It helps that François Ozon is so prolific – this is his tenth picture since Potiche and there are already two more to catch up with – but my views about his work have changed so much over the last decade.  Wonderfully versatile, he’s become one of my favourite directors.  The Crime is Mine is the most satisfying Ozon film that I’ve seen – so far.

    13 February 2026

  • Is This Thing On?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bradley Cooper (2025)

    It’s on a smaller scale than A Star Is Born (2018) and Maestro (2023), and less impressive than either, but Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper’s third directing effort, is also the third film he’s made that’s well worth seeing.  This marital comedy-drama is set in present-day New York.  Alex Novak (Will Arnett) has a job in finance.  His homemaker wife Tess (Laura Dern) was once on the US Olympic volleyball team.  After twenty years of marriage, the couple, who have two sons, decide to separate – amicably but, especially from Alex’s point of view, unhappily.  Once he moves out, Alex and Tess both start to change their lives in other ways.  Tess takes the opportunity to get back into the sport she loves, as a coach.  Alex’s new direction is more accidental and, for quite a while, furtive.  On a glum visit to the Comedy Cellar club in Greenwich Village, he finds he doesn’t have cash on him to pay the cover charge so gets in by putting his name down for that night’s open-mic session.  When his turn comes, he’s tongue-tied until he starts talking about the end of his marriage.  Alex returns to the stage of the Comedy Cellar a second time, and a third.  His jokes about separation and solitude become a well-received comedy routine – which, for Alex, is also a  means of talking to someone about the sadness of being single again.  By the end of Is This Thing On?, he and Tess are back together.

    The screenplay, by Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett and Mark Chappell, is inspired by what happened to British comedian John Bishop (who told Arnett, a friend, about it and receives a story credit on the film).  Born in Liverpool in 1966, Bishop spent a big chunk of his early working life at a pharmaceutical company where he rose to a senior position.  He married in 1993; seven years later, by which time they had three children, he and his wife split up.  One night, Bishop went to the Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester and put his name down for the open mic to avoid paying the £4 entrance fee.  He went down well with the audience – all seven of them – and was invited back.  He was soon doing a weekly gig at the club, talking about marital failure:  one regular joke was that he missed his wife so much he kept her severed head in the fridge.  He and she reconciled and are still together.  (Bishop gave up his corporate job and took up comedy full-time in 2006.  Within a few years, he was Britain’s highest-paid comedian.)

    I’m assuming John Bishop isn’t well known in America but, for this British viewer, he’s one of two important reasons for my reservations about Will Arnett’s protagonist in Is This Thing On?  I kept hearing Bishop’s voice behind Alex’s in the Comedy Cellar and thinking what a difference Bishop’s performing style would have made, his natural vitality a counterpoint to his doleful script.  Bishop has described his Frog and Bucket slot as a form of counselling; the trouble is, Alex on stage looks and sounds as if he really is in therapy and isn’t very funny – even though Arnett’s a highly successful comedian and comic actor across the Atlantic.  (I hadn’t seen him before.)  The second main reason why he’s underwhelming is Bradley Cooper, not the director but the performer.  In A Star Is Born and Maestro, Cooper directed himself in a starring role; in Is This Thing On?, he takes, on camera, something of a back seat but still upstages his leading man.

    Despite the success of both films, Cooper faced criticism for ego-tripping in A Star Is Born and Maestro.  In addition to directing and playing the lead, he co-wrote the screenplay for each and, in A Star Is Born, sang country-rock numbers solo as well as duets with Lady Gaga.  The case against Cooper wasn’t that his acting or direction or (co-)writing wasn’t up to scratch – rather, that he shouldn’t be doing all three things in the same film, which made his detractors seem merely envious of his range of talents.  Did this negative press influence Cooper’s decision to restrict himself to a supporting part in his third film?  There might well have been other factors involved.  He may reasonably have felt that a proven comedian was the best man for the job.  Even he may have decided there was only so much he could do on one project:  in Is This Thing On?, Cooper makes his debut as a camera operator, working alongside DP Matthew Libatique.  (He also has a producing credit, as he did on A Star Is Born and Maestro.)  But it’s hard to ignore the fact that in this latest film Cooper plays a middle-aged hipster actor whose name is Balls and whose high opinion of himself seems not to be shared by others in the business.

    Outside the Comedy Cellar, Balls is the film’s most clear-cut comedy turn, and Cooper, as he showed most recently in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022), is a brilliant comic actor.   He’s very funny as Balls rattles on – about how he outshone an actor he’d understudied and briefly deputised for, about how well he’s done to get a fourth callback for a tiny role.  Even in hirsute semi-disguise, Cooper has far more charisma than Will Arnett, who’s competent and likeable in the offstage parts of Is This Thing On?, but no more than that.  It doesn’t help that Arnett, in profile at least, bears a passing resemblance to Cooper.  Alex and Balls are meant to be old friends; for a while, though, I was under the mistaken impression they were brothers – especially since they pair up believably with Ciarán Hinds, who plays Alex’s father (Christine Ebersole plays his mother).  It doesn’t help Arnett either that there’s nothing of Alex in his day job on Wall Street or wherever.  If there were, we’d at least see the character in another environment, where he’s presumably still managing to function well enough, despite his miserable personal life.  We get occasional shots of him in suit and tie, arriving at what used to be home to pick up his kids (well played by Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten) for an outing or weekend – but Alex’s mood in these bits is his usual droll despondency.

    Laura Dern, a naturally plausible ex-volleyballer thanks to her height, has a much better role here than her other recent one, in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly.  Is This Thing On? switches up a gear from downbeat naturalism when Tess meets up in Manhattan with volleyball coach Laird (Peyton Manning) – a meeting ostensibly to discuss her coaching ambitions but also partly, at least as Tess sees it, a date.  She has told Laird that she and Alex have split before they move from one bar to another – the Comedy Cellar, just in time for Alex’s performance:  Tess hears herself talked about to a sizeable, laughingly appreciative audience.  This, too, is part of what happened to John Bishop:  according to Wikipedia, he’d just delivered the fridge joke when ‘he realised his wife was in the audience, while they were in the final stages of their divorce proceedings.  After the gig, they ended up chatting and reconciled as she was reminded of his earlier, funnier self’.  In Cooper’s film, Tess’s fury with Alex – who rushes out to the street to apologise – quickly dissipates:  she and Alex spend the night together.

    This is the start of a secret liaison that Alex and Tess both enjoy, until it’s stopped in its tracks during a weekend away with Balls, his bitterly unhappy wife (Andra Day) and two gay male friends.  An estranged married couple rekindling a mutual passion has done service in romantic comedy from The Philadelphia Story (1941) to, and probably beyond, It’s Complicated (2009).  Although this time it’s based-on-a-true-story, Alex and Tess’s renewed romance turns Is This Thing On?  into a more conventional film – but a more easily entertaining one, too.  It stays that way to the end.  After their weekend falling out, Alex tries to mend things by insisting to Tess that he wasn’t unhappy with their relationship but, rather, during their relationship:  he wants, he says, to be unhappy with Tess.  It may not be a tempting offer but does, at last, make sense of Will Arnett’s portrait of Alex.  In time-honoured romcom tradition, the final scene sees Alex make a dash to his sons’ school – just in time to join Tess in the audience watching the boys in a band performing ‘Under Pressure’, and to go into a conclusive embrace with his ex-ex-wife.

    In the closing stages, Alex wears a Liverpool FC shirt, evidently a nod to John Bishop (though it turns out Will Arnett is a Liverpool supporter too, and that Alex’s sleeveless red top is so tight because Arnett has owned it since he was a kid).  Although I missed Bishop’s comic presence, relocating the story from North-West England to New York City isn’t in itself a problem, and the Comedy Cellar backstage sequences are nicely done – with, among others, Amy Sedaris as the club emcee, and Chloe Radcliffe and Jordan Jensen as comedians Nina and Jill respectively (Alex has a one-night stand with Jill).  Updating the action from 2000 to now has consequences, of course.  A minor plus is that Tess can be appointed assistant coach for the US women’s volleyball team at the Los Angeles Olympics in two years’ time, a negative that Alex’s routine is more PC-circumspect than John Bishop’s may have been.  If the severed head gets a mention in the film I missed it.  Bradley Cooper’s latest has plenty going for it – including a neat title that picks up on the traditional mic-tapping refuge of the stand-up desperate for a laugh, as well as the doubtful status of Alex and Tess’s life together.  But Is This Thing On? could use a few more off-colour jokes.

    12 February 2026

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