I wrote about Tell No One in a short "Moviegoer Diary" entry earlier this summer, but now that the film is finally arriving in Edmonton theatres this weekend (I originally saw it on DVD), I was forced to come up with a longer, better-written assessment of the film for my review in SEE Magazine. I was always a little unhappy with the tossed-off quality of that original mini-review, and hopefully I can rectify the situation somewhat with the expanded version that follows...* * * * *
Tell No One is a thriller, and about halfway through, there’s a chase scene. So what else is new, right? Except this chase scene is so good, so immediate, so unusually plausible and creates such a convincing sense that its protagonist is actually in real physical danger that I’m prepared to recommend the entire film on the basis of this 10-minute sequence alone.
Here’s what leads up to that chase. Eight years ago, French pediatrician Alex Beck (François Cluzet, who’s perhaps best known in North America for playing the young French jazz fan who befriends Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight) was the prime suspect in the murder of his wife Margot. They were enjoying a late-night swim when an unseen assailant knocked out Alex and killed Margot. Something about the incident never quite added up for the cops — who dragged Alex’s unconscious body onto a raft? And why? — and even today, with the case still unsolved, they regard Alex with suspicion.
So naturally, when two new bodies are found in the same place where Margot was killed, the cops once again start sniffing around Alex. They even find some incriminating evidence in his home. And when they come by his hospital to arrest him, he does what any good hero of a Hitchcockian thriller would do: he bolts.
And so begins the chase scene. Seriously, you’ve got to check it out. It’s exciting because, even though Alex is in good shape and a speedy runner, he’s no action hero. He’s a guy in his work clothes fleeing the police in a blind, clumsy panic, with no thought in his head except putting some distance between himself and the cops chasing him. Never once in the entire sequence do you spot the telltale hand of a stunt choreographer devising nifty little “gags” along the way, not even when Alex finally ditches his pursuers by crossing a busy highway, gingerly making his way from lane to lane as the cars whizz past him at terrifying speeds. No CGI, no tricky editing, no bullshit outbursts of parkour; you genuinely feel like Cluzet is inches away from getting clipped by a rear view mirror at any second. My hat goes off to Cluzet, Canet, editor Hervé de Luze, and what must have been a small squadron of highly trained drivers.
That sense of matter-of-fact realism extends throughout the rest of the film as well. It’s kind of startling to see a movie in which the director doesn’t amplify the sound of punches. There’s one scene, for instance, in which a woman gets brutally beaten — we don’t see her face, but the dull, smacking sounds of fists hitting her flesh seem even more gruesome because they’re so prosaic.
I just wish the actual stuff in the movie — you know, the plot, the needlessly confusing plot — weren't so ho-hum. The first half of Tell No One is filled with tantalizing mysteries — including a series of videos that someone is e-mailing to Alex that seem to suggest that Margot isn’t dead after all — but the second half is given over to long expository speeches explaining what was really going on the whole time... and what was really going on is a lot duller than you’d think.
But the mechanics of movie plots have a way of quickly fading from your memory, while glorious sequences have a way of staying there forever. Tell No One feels like a mild disappointment as you walk out of the theatre, but five years from now, you’ll still be savouring the recollection of that foot chase across the crowded highway. And your pulse will pound just a little bit harder.
0 Yorumlar