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
