Ne le dis à personne
Guillaume Canet (2006)
Alexandre Beck and his wife Margot go skinny-dipping one night in a lake in the Rambouillet forest. (Years before, as childhood sweethearts, they carved a heart on a tree by the same lake.) Margot swims ahead to the other side of the lake. Alex hears her cry in the dark and freestyles frantically across the water – when he climbs out the other side, he’s knocked unconscious. The action resumes eight years later. Alex is a successful doctor in a Paris clinic for children. We learn that Margot was never seen again, that Alex was accused of her murder but eventually released, and that the crime was pinned on a serial killer of women. When the bodies of two men are discovered near the scene of the assumed crime, the police reopen their investigation. Tell No One is about their and Alex’s attempts to discover the truth of what happened the night of Margot’s disappearance. This crime mystery film was a big success both commercially and critically and won four César awards (including Best Director and Best Actor for François Cluzet).
Guillaume Canet and Philippe Lefebvre adapted the screenplay from an American bestseller of the same name by Harlan Coben but if this had been a British or American picture it wouldn’t – in this country anyway – have received anything like the admiring attention this film actually did recxeive. Tell No One – taut, slick and pretty conventional – might have been designed for English-speaking audiences who feel easier enjoying an essentially shallow entertainment if there are subtitles, especially French subtitles, to give it a touch of class. There were moments when I wished even more of the film was in a foreign language. Alex remembers the trauma of Margot’s disappearance and its aftermath in a sequence long enough for ‘Lilac Wine’, sung by Jeff Buckley, to play nearly in its entirety. To a French audience, this probably works all right as mood music. To an English listener, the lyric is almost ludicrously apposite to the events and state of mind that the song is illustrating.
Some of the set pieces, especially the sequence in which Alex is being pursued by the police, are compelling, although the film isn’t particularly penetrating in terms of character study or development: when Alex is led to believe that Margot is still alive, we get very little sense of what that means to her husband. What Tell No One lacks in this department, it certainly makes up for in plot complication – but the way in which this is unravelled is hardly original: a character will explain to another character what really happened and we get a flashback to it. One thing I didn’t get: in the early scenes Alex usually has a cigarette in his mouth but after half an hour he’s a reformed character. How this chain-smoking paediatrician gives up the weed remains an unsolved mystery.
Tell No One is well acted and, as Alex, François Cluzet (who occasionally suggests an untheatrical Dustin Hoffman) is especially good: the sharp vigilance of his expressions seems to blur into a tired, stunned mask as the unbelievable series of events impresses itself on Alex. Cluzet is particularly well supported by François Berléand as the police chief and Gilles Lellouche as the father of a haemophiliac child who feels he owes Alex a favour, and more than repays him. Also with Marie-Josée Croze, Andre Dussollier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Nathalie Baye and Jean Rochefort – and, in smaller roles, Canet himself and Philippe Lefebvre. The impressive editing is by Hervé de Luze.
7 February 2010
