Alain Corneau passed away in August 2010, two days after his final film, Love Crime (Crime d’amour), opened in France and just before it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. I didn’t get a chance to see it in Toronto that year, but finally had a chance to watch it last night, knowing I wanted to watch it before seeing Brian De Palma‘s remake, titled Passion, which will be playing the Venice Film Festival at the end of August.
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, the story begins as the age-old tale of a mentor (Thomas) using the ingenue (Sagnier) for professional gain. While Thomas, as Christine, uses the accomplished work of Isabelle to rise to the top. Isabelle, upset with Christine’s two-faced approach to their relationship, is struggling between the idea of remaining a loyal employee and the voice of her co-worker (Guillaume Marquet) in her ear, telling her she’s being used.
Only hints of a budding sexual relationship between Christine and Isabelle are made, though the whole film is a seduction, one of Isabelle and at the same time the audience. The ambiguous nature of this seduction mirrors the subtlety of the entire feature.
I hadn’t watched a trailer for the film before seeing it. Now, afterward, the trailers aren’t selling the film I saw. Even this, more appropriate trailer is lacking. Selling crimes over the slow burn the feature holds. Critics have been describing it as a Dangerous Liaisons meets Working Girl, but mood, atmosphere and character dominate this film over plot.
Descriptions of films today and the way they are being made is to focus on the plot more than the characters and/or an overall sense of feeling. To sell a film to a studio you need a logline, you can’t just say it’s about a character driven to the edge or it’s about revenge and the claustrophobia the audience is meant to feel when a character is driven beyond their known personality. Even Roger Ebert takes to spoiling the film’s plot in his review for what reason I’m not entirely sure, but few reviews seemed to focus on what I found so utterly fascinating, which was the score and the lack thereof throughout, exploring the emptiness while also bringing us closer to the action when necessary.
The absolute best review of the film I found comes from Seattle’s very own weekly mag “The Stranger“, a paragraph written by Charles Mudede. Or, to be more precise, four sentences from said review:
Blood flows from a wound and pools by a lifeless body. Music flows into the room as if from an open window. It’s a strange composition (by Pharaoh Sanders) that combines the sorrowful sounds of a sax and koto. The sax is American, the koto is Japanese, the crime is French noir.
This noir thriller is very much French and yet very much Japanese and in an interview in the press notes Corneau admits he originally intended to use no music at all, but Pharoah Sanders‘ “Kazuko” (listen to the right) proved inspirational and perfect for the film’s score.
“It is a very tender song, and at the same time it is a little bit violent,” Corneau said. “It exudes a very strange and entrancing atmosphere, which corresponded to the idea I had of the film.”
If I had to describe the film I’d say it’s a revenge tale that feels like a collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Pierre Melville. It felt like a cousin to Melville’s Le Samourai with all the focus on faces and inner emotion you get from a Kurosawa feature. I could just imagine a male-driven version of the same film with Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune or Jean-Paul Belmondo opposite Alain Delon. Wouldn’t the unsuspecting audience be thrown for a loop with these iconic actors exploring a thrilling, ambiguous homoerotic landscape?
De Palma’s Passion, starring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace, is keeping the female angle, but the intensity between the two leads and their motivations seem to have shifted slightly while keeping the plot essentially the same. And based on early images, it appears to have been eroticism.
Passion is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival and has yet to debut a trailer of any sort as it still looks for domestic distribution, but after having seen Love Crime, I’m even more fascinated to see how De Palma will make the material his own.
If you are a Netflix subscriber you can watch Love Crime right now on Instant Play.
