Tell No One - Hitchockian French Twist

Dec

18

Tell No One - Hitchockian French Twist

≡ Category: Action, France, Highly Recommended, Mainstream, Movie Reviews By Country, Suspense |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: France
Genre: Suspense/ Drama/ Action
Director: Guillaume Canet
Year: 2006

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Tell No One is an update of a kind of thriller that isn’t really made anymore in the United States. And that’s a shame, because it’s great fun.

Pediatrician Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) has been mourning the murder of his wife for eight years when he gets an email that seems to be from her. All of a sudden, people are following him and bodies are dropping like flies. Something is sure as hell going on, but what?

From this Hitchcocking premise, writer/director Guillaume Canet, adapting from a novel by Harlan Coben, spins as twisted a tale as you could possibly want.

There’s a lot going on in Tell No One. You’ve got amusing Gallic characters like Alex, Gilbert Neuville (Jean Rochefort), and Hélène Perkins (Kristin Scott Thomas). Hélène is a lesbian, but the script makes no big deal of it.

In fact, one of the great things about Tell No One is how it assumes the audience is intelligent instead of the other way around. Instead of spoon feeding the audience the way American movies do, Tell No One plunges us in the middle of relationships and events and challenges us to figure it out on the fly. No going out for popcorn in the middle of this flick. Blink and you’ll miss essential information.

Every once in a while, you get some pretty nifty action, include a doozy of a chase scene in which Alex evades the police by crossing a very busy eight lane highway.

I should probably mention that the acting is excellent throughout. I especially liked the almost wordless performance by Mikaela Fisher, who plays a very scary hitwoman who tortures people by strategically squeezing their vital organs. I also enjoyed Bruno (Gilles Lellouche), a hoodlum who is grateful to Alex for treating his hemophiliac son.

The only thing I had a problem with was the musical score, which featured at least a half dozen pop tunes sung in English, from the likes of Otis Redding. It was very strange to hear such quintessentially American tunes in a Gallic setting. I think the filmmakers thought that including English language tunes would broaden the audience for their movie — they’re probably right, too. But for me, a big part of the draw of Tell No One was the Frenchness of the mileau and how the characters reacted to standard thriller situations. For me, the more specifically French the atmosphere, the more entertaining I found it.

But that’s not even a flaw, really — it’s more something I reacted to negatively out of a personal idiosyncrasy.

If you’re tired of American thrillers that insist on treating you like a moron, check out Tell No One. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.