Guillaume Canet’s second movie is trying, from beginning to end. Francois Cluzet is absolutely brilliant in the role of a feverish and haggard widower, trying to cope with his wife’s brutal death. Eight years after her murder, he receives an anonymous email: a live video of his wife standing in the middle of a crowd, in broad daylight.Cluzet is transcended by his character’s grief - every inch of his body is tense, as if standing on the edge of a cliff. His struggle to find the truth about his wife’s unsolved disappearance is literally a matter of life or death. So it is both the thriller and the love story that have Cluzet run around like a mad man. And boy does he do it well.
The script is dense in the thriller mode, but also very emotional and verging on the sinister. Distressing themes (a serial killer, a paedophile, and numerous torture scenes) make it painful all around. Only the ideal love that was sketched at the beginning (the memory of which haunts the hero throughout the film) saves it from utter blackness.
The movie has its lengths, some shortcuts and a handful of awkward moments, including Canet’s use of soundtrack. I could feel his satisfaction at having found these beautifully expressive songs that suit the reclusive hero’s state of mind so well. But he uses them as chanted subtitles, translating Cluzet’s thoughts in a not so subtle way. The music takes over the narrative, but is too linear an application to succeed at being lyrical.
There also are some clichés in the depiction of the love story (puppy love turned into an adult and enchanted relationship). It is embodied through flashbacks by two children. Their pre-adolescent courtship frames the movie, giving it a fairy tale feel. It makes the macabre twist all the more horrific. A subliminal beat seems to hammer all along that this pure and naive love did not deserve such an agonizing end. With its paedophilia background, the whole thing becomes a moral tale on lost innocence. This is more irritating -and unsettling- than moving. A subtle allusion to their childhood would have been sufficient: the couple portrayed in the opening scenes (adult, luminous, sensual) does not need the past to legitimate their present. This corniness diminishes the scope of the human tragedy, turning it into a slightly oppressive fable.
This movie is not a bad one. In fact, it’s a movie I tried really hard to love. But there is an uneasy ‘je ne sais quoi’ in the process of combining two genres into one movie, as if love story and thriller had met on a road and walked side by side, without so much as exchanging a glance. Only Cluzet binds these two in his beautiful performance. A certain stiffness in the direction and the overpowering sense of a paradise lost gave me a chill, despite the patent good will of the young director and his gifted cast.
