Having more or less proved himself as an actor Guillaume Canet tried his hand at Writing and Directing and the result is fairly respectable so that anyone seeing this in 2002 may well have predicted a solid future for Guillaume behind the camera and would have been proved right when Ne le dis a personne won him a Best Director Cesar (plus a Best Actor for Francois Cluzet) last year.
It's never easy to blur genres - Billy Wilder did it brilliantly in The Apartment but how many Billy Wilders are there out there? That's right, you can count them on the fingers of one thumb - and segue from Satire to Manipulation to Violence but on the whole Canet manages to pull it off more or less successfully. He seems to have a knack for picking solid leading men (witness Cluzet in Ne le dis a personne) and in Francois Berleand he found the ideal actor to personify corruption. Berleand has a long history - some 166 titles - of supporting the finest French actors with a recent foray into leading man status and here he provides the industrial-strength cement that holds the film together. It's nearly always a bad idea for a director to cast his wife in a film at all let alone a leading role and when the wife in question (they divorced last year) is Diane Kruger it is more Disaster than bad idea but Canet himself plays perfectly against Berleand and if he just misses some of his targets they are not the Satirical ones of television Game Shows. On balance a fine effort.
It's never easy to blur genres - Billy Wilder did it brilliantly in The Apartment but how many Billy Wilders are there out there? That's right, you can count them on the fingers of one thumb - and segue from Satire to Manipulation to Violence but on the whole Canet manages to pull it off more or less successfully. He seems to have a knack for picking solid leading men (witness Cluzet in Ne le dis a personne) and in Francois Berleand he found the ideal actor to personify corruption. Berleand has a long history - some 166 titles - of supporting the finest French actors with a recent foray into leading man status and here he provides the industrial-strength cement that holds the film together. It's nearly always a bad idea for a director to cast his wife in a film at all let alone a leading role and when the wife in question (they divorced last year) is Diane Kruger it is more Disaster than bad idea but Canet himself plays perfectly against Berleand and if he just misses some of his targets they are not the Satirical ones of television Game Shows. On balance a fine effort.