“Love Crime” is the last film made by French director Alain Corneau, who died last year. He’s best known on this side of the world for “Tous les matins du monde,” a fictionalized portrait of Baroque composer Marin Marais, portrayed as an old and young man by Gerard Depardieu and his son (now also deceased) Guillaume. But don’t let the age of the filmmaker or the setting of his best-known film make you think that Corneau can’t possibly know anything about contemporary life. “Love Crime” is a delicious thriller about women in the workplace, women who have learned to be just as vicious as the most cutthroat men.
Kristin Scott Thomas, also familiar to American audiences, is Christine, an executive at a multinational agribusiness firm. Though she’s certainly a looker, she’s not exactly a candidate for Boss of the Year. Her put-upon assistant, Isabelle (the impossibly beautiful Ludivine Sagnier, who so charmed in “Moliere”), is a talented employee who could use a (female) mentor like Christine. Instead, Christine toys with her like a cat with a mouse, finally going so far as to pass off the younger woman’s sharp ideas as her own.
| On screen |
| ‘Love Crime’ |
| 3 out of 4 stars |
| Stars: Ludivine Sagnier, Kristin Scott Thomas |
| Director: Alain Corneau |
| Rated: Not rated (some violence and sexual situations) |
| Running time: 106 minutes |
That’s a step too far for Isabelle, and we finally see that she’s not really the doormat that she’s appeared to be. She’ll use her brains not to help Christine get ahead, but to end her career.
And possibly her romance. A sexy French thriller like this has to have its complications, after all. Christine is dating another executive, Philippe (Patrick Mille), and Isabelle follows Christine’s lead in this, too, beginning an illicit affair with him. Don’t expect this love triangle to resolve in any expected way.
To say any more would ruin the pleasures of an engaging film, though savvy viewers might guess the surprises before they arrive. What’s not unpredictable, though, is the work of the two stars. Scott Thomas stunned in one of the best English-language movies ever made, “The English Patient,” but now is doing her best work in France, where she’s lived since she was a teenager. She should have gotten another Oscar nod for 2008’s “I’ve Loved You So Long,” in which she portrayed a woman just freed from prison. Sagnier has a knowing sexiness that plays perfectly in the erotic game on screen here. It would have been a crime, indeed, not to have pit these two and their contrasting charms against one another.
