Tell No One
Directed by Guillaume Canet
The French cinema was once arguably the world’s best.
The glorious films of Marcel Pagnol (Fanny) and René Clair (Under the Roofs of Paris) and Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game) were among the highlights of the 1930s. The beautiful work of Marcel Carné (Children of Paradise) and Jean Cocteau (Les Enfants Terribles) helped keep French culture alive in the 1940s. The wonderful productions of Max Ophüls (La Ronde) made eyes pop in the early 1950s. And the spiky, quick, ultra-naturalistic “New Wave” flicks by François Truffaut (Jules and Jim) and Claude Chabrol (The Cousins) and Louis Malle (Zazie dans le Métro) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) revolutionized the craft of moviemaking from the late 1950s through the early 1970s.
Time was, when a French film was released in the United States, its audience would leave the theater with the distinct sense that they had just been present at a cultural feast no American movie could match.
But that was then and this is now, and the only arguably great film made in France in the past three decades is Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette from 1986, a magnificent epic on a small scale about a disputed water hole in Provence. Otherwise, with the exception of the brilliant farces of Francis Veber, whose The Dinner Game (1998) and The Valet (2006) are among the funniest movies of our time, French cinema is all but moribund. French films that hit the export market have tended to be long on production design-like Diva, a fashion spread posing as a movie that made a sensation in 1982, or the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Besson, auteur of La Femme Nikita and producer of dozens of similarly well-photographed pieces of mindless nonsense.
Now, direct from winning many prizes at the 2007 César Awards (the Gallic Oscars), comes Tell No One, a thriller that may be the best-reviewed French movie in years in the American press. The praise and the awards indicate not only how far French films have fallen, but just how easily seduced movie critics can be by a few subtitles.
At the beginning, a nice pediatrician and his lovely wife are skinny-dipping when they have an argument. She swims away angrily onto shore and, out of sight, yelps. He goes to see what has happened and gets hit on the head. We cut forward eight years. The authorities have ascribed his wife’s death to a serial killer. But then some bodies turn up near the site where she was killed. The police begin to think he might have killed them all. And then he gets an email from his wife.
It’s a strong opening, but what follows from it is a muddle. When the plot makes sense, it is ludicrous; but mostly it’s incomprehensible, and like all bad thrillers, relies on characters acting foolishly or knowing far more than it is possible for them to know. It turns out that the pediatrician’s wife, his wife’s father, his fashionably lesbian sister, and his own father were all caught up for months in a child-abuse scandal about which he knew absolutely nothing, even though he seems like a reasonably intelligent fellow. The plot requires an industrialist to have had a team of people shadowing our hero for eight years when they have no reason to doubt that his wife (who is the subject of their interest) is long since dead. That she is not, in fact, dead is actually a complete coincidence.
The cowriter/director of Tell No One, Guillaume Canet, has made a movie whose proper home would be on Saturday night as a Lifetime made-for-television feature. In fact, the film is based on an American potboiler by Harlan Coben that was originally purchased by Hollywood for Keanu Reeves. Reeves, demonstrating that he is not as dumb as the characters he plays, wisely refused, and Canet secured the rights to it. At least when François Truffaut decided to film a dime-store American novel called Down There back in 1962, he came up with the stunning Shoot the Piano Player. What is Canet’s excuse?
If Tell No One proves anything, it is that Jack Lang, the notoriously anti-American culture minister in the early years of François Mitterrand’s government, may have had a soupçon of a point when, in 1982, he railed against “this domination, against-let us call a spade a spade-this financial and intellectual imperialism.” Of course, no imperialist power forced Guillaume Canet to make Tell No One, and no imperialist power compelled France’s cultural pooh-bahs to garland it with awards. But it does demonstrate that France, once a great power in the world of film, has become a provincial backwater eager and hungry to forage for Hollywood’s scraps.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
