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THE CRIME IS MINE ★★★
(MA) 104 minutes
Accused of murder, a young woman admits to the deed but maintains she was defending herself against sexual assault. Public sympathy flows towards her, and soon she’s celebrated not as a criminal but as a heroine. But this fame comes with a catch: what if it’s all a sham, and the crime was committed by someone else?
Pauline (Rebecca Marder, left) and Madeline (Nadia Tereszkiewicz).
The idea of having to cover up the fact you didn’t kill someone has the neat perversity that is the hallmark of French writer-director Francois Ozon (8 Women). The theme of a predator who gets his just deserts also has obvious contemporary resonance, although The Crime is Mine is based on a 1934 play adapted for film on a couple of previous occasions, notably as the Hollywood screwball comedy True Confession in 1937.
True Confession was a vehicle for the wonderful Carole Lombard, who played a compulsive liar married to a straight-arrow lawyer (Fred MacMurray). Ozon drops the husband character and much of the screwball aspect and makes this a story about two level-headed young women, who share a cramped top-floor apartment in Depression-era Paris (by design, a storybook Paris, where even poverty has a cosy glow).
Of the pair, Madeline (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) wants to act, while Pauline (Rebecca Marder) is not long out of law school. So when Madeline is in a legal jam, she naturally calls on her friend for help, and, just as naturally, the courtroom becomes a theatre in its own right.
It’s an enjoyable diversion, on the whole: only half as funny as True Confession, but that’s still not half bad. The actors are all encouraged to mug, and the willed staginess sometimes becomes outright stiltedness, notably in the scenes with Fabrice Luchini as a pedantic magistrate. Dany Boon, on the other hand, is very deft as a selectively compassionate ladies’ man.
The letdown is Isabelle Huppert, who appears halfway through as the silent movie queen turned blackmailer Odette Chaumette (a reimagining of an originally male role, played in True Confession by John Barrymore). She’s meant to steal the show, and we’re cued to expect great things by her extravagant look: black opera gloves, sickly green eyeshadow, a mass of red curls topped with a hat that might belong to a surrealist witch.
Yet none of this feels entirely right for Huppert, who thrives on the outrageous but also on understatement, as opposed to the kind of broad clowning required here. She rattles off her lines and waves her arms around, but the core idea of the character doesn’t entirely land: it’s not clear how shrewd Odette really is under all her affectations, or how far she in turn might qualify as victim rather than villain.
Some of these issues may relate to the furtive quality of Ozon’s temperament, that of an artist out to please and provoke. As in many of his films, he teases with possibilities that remain unexplored: for instance, that the bond between his heroines could amount to more than friendship, on Pauline’s side at least.
The apparent feminist message also comes with a dash of irony, given the story could also be taken as a joke at the expense of the modern slogan, “Believe women”. Is that suggestive ambiguity, or just having it both ways? You be the judge.
The Crime is Mine is released in cinemas on October 12.
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