Monday, June 18, 2007

Ne le dis à personne (Tell No-one)

From the start this one had the vibe of one of those knotty Euro-thrillers that you need to see several times just to locate all those secret plot points.

But what was rather Swimming Pool for the first hour or so became all very Inspector Morse at the end, and in spite of some enjoyable chase scenes (described by Kermode as "The French Connection à pied") the long drawn out wrapping up process was enough to put anyone off a second viewing. It leaves you yearning for the durable ambiguity of a Caché. (You get the feeling that François Cluzet must have been understudying for Daniel Auteuil for most of his professional life.)

The film handles its underclasses more deftly and with greater originality than it does its upper classes, perhaps in part because the source novel was written by an American (Harlan Coben).

The moral here seems to be that its OK to murder kiddy-fiddlers, especially overprivileged equestrian ones.

Why do French detectives always come in the same basic pairing of the young, headstrong one and his boss the canny old scruff?

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