If this doesn’t give us what we expect and want from a French thriller, part of the reason must lie in its source, an American mystery novel by Harlan Coben. Convoluted and contorted beyond resemblance to organic life on Earth, concocted and cockamamie beyond the realm of all probability, it boasts the sort of plotting where an unassuming Parisian pediatrician, hounded by a remorseless hit squad, can call in a favor (i.e., troop support) from a grateful hoodlum with a hemophiliac infant. Or where a handy heroin addict will turn up dead at just the moment when you need a body in order to stage a faux murder, and you can count on no one noticing the discrepancies between the autopsy cadaver and the supposed victim. All along the way the storytelling employs withholding and delaying tactics whose effect is more annoyance than suspense; and at the finish it features a long-winded verbal summation that, besides its bookishness, compresses the absurdities into an intolerably small space. All that aside, the film is perforce populated with Frenchmen (and bilingual Canadian and British women), who, true to form, work hard and selflessly to engage our interest: François Cluzet, the Gallic Dustin Hoffman, in looks at least, if not also in rodenty intensity, as the doctor who believes he has lost his wife to a serial killer, and comes to find out, on the eighth anniversary of the event, that he may not have lost her for good; Marie-Josée Croze (the Canadian) as the absent wife; Kristin Scott-Thomas (the Brit) as an uptown lesbian; the formidable Nathalie Baye as a high-priced and all-business attorney; François Berléand as the dogged, obsessive-compulsive cop on the case (exasperated, for example, at his underling’s carelessness in differentiating between the trash bin and the recycling bin); and the venerable veterans Jean Rochefort and André Dussollier as separately grieving fathers. The latter, with supreme poise and not a hint of a knee-buckle, shoulders the brunt of the absurdity. Directed by Guillaume Canet. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.