Love Crime

 

3 Stars

The sleek French thriller "Love Crime" accomplishes a staggering amount, without much fuss, in its first two minutes.

A swank Paris apartment, evening.

Christine, the upper-echelon agribusiness executive played by Kristin Scott Thomas, is going over plans for the upcoming Cairo meeting with her fastidious assistant, Isabelle, played by Ludivine Sagnier. "Bordeaux?" offers Christine, after inquiring about her minion's perfume and nuzzling her neck.

Then a man enters the apartment: He is another co-worker, Christine's employee and paramour. Isabelle, a bit dazed, goes home alone to a conspicuously large bed.

Just as swiftly "Love Crime" establishes an affair between Isabelle and Christine's boyfriend (Patrick Mille), while establishing the boss as a lying, craven weasel, happy to take full credit for Isabelle's most popular business proposals and solutions. Meantime there's the matter of the boyfriend's shady accounting practices (and cocaine habit). With a script by director Alain Corneau and Natalie Carter, the film may be longer on guessing games and structure than it is on three-dimensional human misbehavior. Yet "Love Crimes" -- faintly comic throughout in its compression and improbability -- acquires a nice jolt of suspense once a major character (I won't say who) commits the titular crime, and then points the finger of suspicion in a most unlikely direction.

The multinational food corporation employing all these schemers is called Barney and Johnson, presumably American in origin, and while it may be overreaching to suggest that Corneau and company are taking a dig at what "Love Crimes" perceives as Yankee-style corporate ethics, it's there if you want to make something of it. The movie's welter of flashbacks grows somewhat conventional in the second half. But the craftsmanship lifts this genre exercise above the routine. Scott Thomas can play these sorts of ice queens in her sleep, but I've long thought she's a more effective and nuanced performer in French-language projects than in English-language ones. The performance is laced with just enough wit to make it sting. And Sagnier is versatile enough to make this buttoned-up workaholic of increasingly valid resentments a woman of teasing ambiguity.

Corneau died last year.

In an interview after completing "Love Crime," he called the finished film one of his "little Fritz Lang labyrinths," referring to Lang's morally murky melodramas. This swan song, Corneau said, stemmed from a simple notion: "How can you prove you are innocent by making yourself looking guilty?! It's a crazy idea, which I thought about a long time before finding a way to develop it." Mission accomplished. And thanks to the actresses, accomplished in high, icy style.

 

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"Love Crime" Movie Trailer

 

No MPAA rating: (some violence, language, sexual material and drug use).

Running time: 1:46.

Cast: Ludivine Sagnier (Isabelle); Kristin Scott Thomas (Christine); Patrick Mille (Philippe); Guillaume Marquet (Daniel); Gerald Laroche (Gerard); Marie Guillard (Claudine).

Credits: Directed by Alain Corneau; written by Corneau and Natalie Carter; produced by Said Ben Said. An IFC Films release. In French with English subtitles.

 

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