Director : Denis Dercourt
Producer : Michel Saint-Jean
Screenwriter : Denis Dercourt, Jacques Sotty
Starring : Catherine Frot, Déborah François, Pascal Greggory, Antoine Martyciow, Clotilde Mollet, Xavier De Guillebon
Drained bourgeois chill is so 2001. Denis Dercourt's debut thriller The Page
Turner has the ethereal calm of a "Sounds of the Ocean" mix tape and it doesn't
seem the least bit interested in disrupting that tone. With its demented
psychosexual ramblings and robust flourishes of music, this would-be Chabrol
rip-off (without the humor and panache) has a certain charm about it, but that
doesn't constitute a successful exercise necessarily.
As a young butcher's daughter, Melanie had talent at the piano. Her father
would stay up and listen to her play while saving up enough money to possibly
send her off to an academy that deals in gifted pianists. Her audition gets
sabotaged when one of the instructors, Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot),
allows an autograph hound into the recital, breaking her concentration. She
goes home, locks up her piano, and puts her little Mozart statue in the closet.
Skip to a decade or so later where Melanie (Déborah François) has nabbed a
high-end internship at a prestigious law firm. The head of the firm is Monsieur
Fouchecourt (the great Pascal Greggory), the husband of the woman who
killed-off Melanie's young aspirations. When the Monsieur is in need of a
housekeeper to help out with his wife's nervosa and his son's adolescent
yearnings, Melanie jumps at the chance. Ariane takes to her immediately, hiring
her as her page turner for an upcoming concert and effectively gives Melanie a
control over her emotional state... which leads to disaster.
Neither a disaster nor a complete bore, The Page Turner has a placid nature to
it that belies its intricate psychological ponderings. Not completely unlike
Dominik Moll's Lemming, the mood and tone hold a striking clarity, but the
timid mis-en-scene can't match the complexity of character and character
psyche. The key difference is that Lemming unwraps and unravels like a Raymond
Carver story being mulled over by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; The Page Turner
could be best described as a Mary Gaitskill throwaway with designs on Michael
Haneke and Catherine Breillat.
That the story holds a lack of conflict that becomes fatally passé in the
film's shaky fourth quarter. Ariane's obsessive attachment to Melanie has
devious and fascinating possibilities but Dercourt barely scratches the surface
of these tangled sexual yearnings. There is one obvious saving grace: Déborah
François. Best known as the teen parent of the titular infant in the Dardenne
brothers' L'Enfant, François gives a smashing, coiled performance that brings
out the few slight thrills in Dercourt's script. As she holds the son's head
under water or pierces the foot of a sexually-forward musician, she keeps her
demeanor as glacially cool as the film's sterilized semblance. For a film that
keeps everything, including bourgeois ethos, within the lines, she's the
singular note that rings true.
Aka La Tourneuse de pages.
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" Weak "
Rating: R, 2007