When a movie ostensibly about a classical pianist begins with slabs of raw meat being hacked to pieces, you know that something is wickedly off-key. Such is the case with today’s subtly eerie, exceedingly French thriller about a spiteful butcher’s daughter with dashed dreams of musical grandeur, “The Page Turner” (“La Tourneuse de Pages”).
Yes, only in a French fantasy of dark revenge would a case of tendonitis or a freak cello accident be the nonlethal brand of physical injury to come to characters while the emotional destruction would be on a thermonuclear scale.
And only in such a French drama would the perpetrator of the vengeance be a young, coldhearted, immaculately beautiful blonde who seduces men and women with magnetic eroticism, though she never even has to take them to bed.
Had the same story been told by Hollywood, you can just imagine how much blood, nudity and overstated action would have been required.
Instead, director and co-writer Denis Dercourt uses smooth calibration to express the sinister motivations of anti-heroine Melanie Prouvost.
Played with creepy consistency at first by 10-year-old Julie Richalet and then by the fiery-eyed Deborah François, Melanie has never recovered from failing the crucial childhood audition that would have landed her a place in a program to assure her career as a classical pianist. But that audition was rudely interrupted when judge and professional pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (played by veteran French actress Catherine Frot) signed an autograph in the middle of her performance, which threw off little Melanie and permanently shattered her aspirations.
About a decade later, Melanie is still fixated on the disrespect and covertly manipulates her way into Ariane’s household as a nanny for her son Tristan (Antoine Martynciow) and then as a page turner at her concerts. So roll over, Beethoven, because Melanie is about to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting Ariane’s professional and personal life, which has grown fragile over the years. Ariane’s stage fright, her loving marriage to a prominent lawyer, her latent lesbian tendencies and her child — nothing is off the table to Melanie. Her daggers may not be literal ones, but the she-villain devastates her victim with wounds as deep.
Interestingly, obsession and vengeance are big themes in that, you know, other movie opening this week. But if the big in-your-face stylings of “Spiderman 3” aren’t your thing, the modest “Page Turner” may just hit the right note.
‘The Page Turner’
4/5 stars
Starring: Deborah François, Catherine Frot
Director: Denis Dercourt
Not rated
Now showing: Landmark E Street Cinema
» In French with English subtitles
