This French movie, written and directed by women (two different ones), falls squarely into the serial killer genre, or so it initially seems. It starts off rather typical, a mousy but beautiful blonde woman, Claire, who sports glasses (to show her extreme mousiness) and is often filmed wearing a tightly wrapped wool coat and painful-looking high heels, works as an insurance agent who examines people filing claims. She's a bit proper and a bit pushed around, as we come to see as her co-workers unload their work on her because they know she won't say no. She is married to a somewhat unambitious photographer husband, played by the yummy Jonathan Zaccai (I bought a ticket for this movie because of him, I'll admit it) and has a daughter, aged around 5 or 6, who is afraid of the dark. So far so good. We have a boring nuclear family.
Claire also has a "wild" friend Valerie. How do we know she's wild? She sleeps around a lot, dumps her boyfriends after one month, and in one particularly annoying scene, hears a song she likes on the radio, turns it up, and starts dancing wildly, much to Claire's bemusement. Yup, that slut has to die! She is essentially the opposite of Claire. Brunette whereas Claire is blonde, sexually and personally "liberated", while Claire is a slave to her family and job, wisecracking where Claire is austere.
Anyway, Claire investigates a vet's office, where the basement has flooded. We get an eerie scene, where the vet, Laurent, leaves Claire to walk around the dark, flooded basement, and from that moment on, the tension begins to build. To make a long story short, Laurent and Claire hit it off, Laurent initially doing more of the hitting until Claire falls in love with him, and he starts to back off. Why? Because he's got daddy issues and he feels the need to carve up slutty ladies and sees Claire as "different", someone he could actually love. For the first time in his life (cue the music).
This is where the film gets interesting. The audience knows Laurent is the killer, (at least I think we are supposed to) and as the story progresses, we start to actually like him. There's a key point here, up until late in the film we never see him kill anybody and that contributes greatly to our process of sympathizing. We see the Laurent that Claire sees. All until one scene, where we see a murder so graphic, so no-holds-barred, that we are shocked at our previous opinions. It's a brilliant cinematic move, arresting, indicting, grotesque.
However, Claire is not totally innocent either, as news reports of a man killing women with a scalpel arise, Claire begins to question what Laurent might be moonlighting as. Yes, she knows it and she can't bring herself to leave him alone, because she starts to feel- alive, which begs the question, does she like him for him or because he's a serial killer? She loses the glasses (isn't it interesting how actors never actually need the glasses they wear?), starts to wear makeup, leaves her home late at night to meet up with Laurent at seedy bars- we're very close to S&M territory here, but Fontaine never takes that route. We learn small things about Claire, such as when she was a child, she was forgotten at the beach by her family, or that when she was an adolescent, she used to cut herself to remind herself that she was living. Laurent just listens, passing no judgment, knowing his levels of craziness far outweigh hers.
I don't know which aspect of the movie is starker, the fact that Claire sympathizes with a serial killer, or that we do. Laurent is essentially like the sleeping lion? tiger? that we see him treat, potentially ferocious but sweet when asleep.
The film ends with a beautiful but ambiguous shot of Claire alone, walking towards the ferris wheel that she and Laurent rode together previously in the film. Ferris wheels seem to me to be emblematic of youth, innocence, first dates, first kisses, all of course from previous cinematic treatments of them, and I think one of the film's themes is innocence, the innocence of not knowing, of love, of hoping, of children, of animals, and the inevitable corruption of that innocence.
cococravescinema.blogspot.com
Claire also has a "wild" friend Valerie. How do we know she's wild? She sleeps around a lot, dumps her boyfriends after one month, and in one particularly annoying scene, hears a song she likes on the radio, turns it up, and starts dancing wildly, much to Claire's bemusement. Yup, that slut has to die! She is essentially the opposite of Claire. Brunette whereas Claire is blonde, sexually and personally "liberated", while Claire is a slave to her family and job, wisecracking where Claire is austere.
Anyway, Claire investigates a vet's office, where the basement has flooded. We get an eerie scene, where the vet, Laurent, leaves Claire to walk around the dark, flooded basement, and from that moment on, the tension begins to build. To make a long story short, Laurent and Claire hit it off, Laurent initially doing more of the hitting until Claire falls in love with him, and he starts to back off. Why? Because he's got daddy issues and he feels the need to carve up slutty ladies and sees Claire as "different", someone he could actually love. For the first time in his life (cue the music).
This is where the film gets interesting. The audience knows Laurent is the killer, (at least I think we are supposed to) and as the story progresses, we start to actually like him. There's a key point here, up until late in the film we never see him kill anybody and that contributes greatly to our process of sympathizing. We see the Laurent that Claire sees. All until one scene, where we see a murder so graphic, so no-holds-barred, that we are shocked at our previous opinions. It's a brilliant cinematic move, arresting, indicting, grotesque.
However, Claire is not totally innocent either, as news reports of a man killing women with a scalpel arise, Claire begins to question what Laurent might be moonlighting as. Yes, she knows it and she can't bring herself to leave him alone, because she starts to feel- alive, which begs the question, does she like him for him or because he's a serial killer? She loses the glasses (isn't it interesting how actors never actually need the glasses they wear?), starts to wear makeup, leaves her home late at night to meet up with Laurent at seedy bars- we're very close to S&M territory here, but Fontaine never takes that route. We learn small things about Claire, such as when she was a child, she was forgotten at the beach by her family, or that when she was an adolescent, she used to cut herself to remind herself that she was living. Laurent just listens, passing no judgment, knowing his levels of craziness far outweigh hers.
I don't know which aspect of the movie is starker, the fact that Claire sympathizes with a serial killer, or that we do. Laurent is essentially like the sleeping lion? tiger? that we see him treat, potentially ferocious but sweet when asleep.
The film ends with a beautiful but ambiguous shot of Claire alone, walking towards the ferris wheel that she and Laurent rode together previously in the film. Ferris wheels seem to me to be emblematic of youth, innocence, first dates, first kisses, all of course from previous cinematic treatments of them, and I think one of the film's themes is innocence, the innocence of not knowing, of love, of hoping, of children, of animals, and the inevitable corruption of that innocence.
cococravescinema.blogspot.com