“LOVE CRIME” My rating: C+ (Opening Oct. 28 at the Tivoli)
104 minutes | no MPAA rating
They’re speaking French in “Love Crime,” but in just about every other respect this a decidedly non-Gallic movie, a formulaic “thriller” that has Hollywood’s thick fingerprints smudged all over it.
At least this effort — the final film from the late director Alain Corneau (“All the Mornings of the World”) — can boast of bilingual thesp Kristin Scot Thomas in wicked witch mode. That, at least, is something to see.
Scott Thomas plays Christine, a vice president at a French multinational company. She’s suave, well-heeled, charming (when it’s called for) and utterly ruthless.
Always at her elbow is the prim, proper Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier), who seems not to have much personality of her own. Utterly capable and equally nonglamorous, Isabelle appears to live vicariously through her older boss, happily diving into whatever chore needs doing and observing –with just a hint of yearning — as Christine beds their associate Philippe (Patrick Mille).
The film suggests — just barely — that there may be a sexual attraction between the two women.
Eager to please, Isabelle is excited but nervous when Christine sends her out of the country to conduct an important piece of business. She’s less thrilled when Christine takes credit for her triumph.
By this time Isabelle, relishing her newfound confidence, has taken up with Philippe, although you can’t shake the feeling that the romance is being orchestrated from the wings by Christine.
Ludivine Sagnier and Kristin Scott Thomas
When Christine publicly eviscerates her assistant at a big office party, the gloves come off. Isabelle teams with another junior exec (Guillaume Marquet) to wage a covert war on the overbearing veep. Eventually it leads to a brutal murder, a coverup (the French cops are, apparently, idiots) and Isabelle’s ascendency to power. The mouse has become a lion.
This might be more fun if Sagnier were a more dynamic screen presence.
But too often she seems to be in retreat on the screen. That’s certainly the case here, where the darkening of Isabelle’s personality is to be found less in an assertive performance than in the growing sophistication of the character’s wardrobe and hair style.
Viewed charitably, one might conclude that “Love Crime” is about the dehumanizing effects of corporate capitalism.
But that’s a stretch. This is simply a modest workplace potboiler. You could imagine it being remade for the Lifetime cable network with Susan Lucci as Christine and any number of vacuous but attractive young actresses in the Isabelle role.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
Bob – I’m in about 90% agreement with your review of “Love Crime,” but I’d like to quibble a bit. My 10% quibble is over the title of your critical essay, “About as French as Dallas.”
You write, “They’re speaking French in “Love Crime,” but in just about every other respect this a decidedly non-Gallic movie, a formulaic “thriller” that has Hollywood’s thick fingerprints smudged all over it.”
I’d suggest that is the point of the movie.
Christina is a top exec at an American based, multi-national corporation, and while outside her office, we see the landscape of Paris, France, inside the world these characters are inhabiting, there is no longer a France, or a Sweden, or a Germany, or a Japan, there is only the multinational corporation that is the imaginary world of the old American TV series “Dallas.”
So, I’d say the title of your essay, “About as French as ‘Dallas’” is quite right, but rather than a slam at the movie, it points to its one strength. I’d suggest that Corneau, in his last film, is making that very point, in the age of the Euro, Paris is about as French as Dallas. That was the similar to the political point he was making in his previous critically acclaimed 2005 film, “Fear and Trembling,” that played-out similar themes in Love Crime. As you’ll recall, in that film, it was also a human drama set within the New World Order, of late-capitalism’s corporate Japan.
Twenty years ago the highly influential French Cultural Theorist, Jean Baudrillard, wrote, that in the Postmodern world, “The world dreams itself American.” He was trying to explain the schizophrenic fissure between the world’s distaste for America as a Nation, and it’s embrace of American Pop Culture. Rome faced the same problem.
Interestingly, this theme was, perhaps, first explored in the French comedy by Jacques Tati’s “Mon Oncle” – one of the great French films to warn that France is becoming a copy of the American TV show, “Dallas. “
Otherwise, your review is “spot-on.”