Refrigerated Forties-style melodrama from French director Claude Chabrol (and from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong, original author also of Chabrol's excellent La Rupture). The gabby exposition takes a while to set up the situation: a chocolate heiress and a concert pianist, long-time friends and lovers, have elected to tie the knot only after the eighteenth birthday of the pianist's son, a bit of a couch potato, prone to accompany the Liszt or the Schubert of his father with the electronic beeps of a pocket video game. Somewhere across town (lovely, lakeside Lausanne), the wedding announcement in the paper stirs memories of an apparent mix-up in the maternity ward when a nurse presented the pianist with a baby girl as his newborn. Isn't it odd that the girl, now eighteen as well and only just learning of this, is herself an aspiring pianist? How can she resist ringing the great man's doorbell? Once set up, the situation could be characterized as suspensefully unfocussed. Where's the core of it? Where's the goal? Family, plainly enough, is at issue; legitimacy; security; rivalry; rot. But if this is a "Hitchcockian" thriller as advertised, where's the menace, the malevolence, not to mention the motive? Well of course Chabrol comes with the adjective "Hitchcockian" only out of old habit. The Master was never so languid, so oblique, so discreet. Chabrol, however, is something of a master in his own right at deploying the camera for mood, tone, subtle inflection, strong emphasis: he gives rise to several delectable frissons when the camera slides decisively into place, as if searching, finding, then fastening on. And he is greatly aided by the enigmatic performance of Isabelle Huppert, always the dutiful servant to the will of her director and to the needs of the project (so tactful, so respectful, so French), in the role of the cool, aloof, calculating heiress. Not all the combined skills of Chabrol and Huppert, collaborators on numerous other occasions, can save the plot from ridiculousness and obviousness. Under those circumstances, their efforts appear all the more valiant and stirring. Anna Mouglalis, Jacques Dutronc, Rodolphe Pauly, Brigitte Catillon. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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