Rendez-Vous. 5.

Director/co-writer (with Jacques Sotty) Denis Dercourt's The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages) is one of the quietest thrillers I've seen, and yet it is indeed thrilling and chilling in its own reserved manner, with its tiny moments of violence perfectly timed and delivered. By today's standards of brutality, they will barely register with the crowd who wallows in Hostel and Wolf Creek, but for those who appreciate subtlety, they rank among the genre's finest. One in particular should give victims of sexual harassment sustenance at seeing justice served promptly and cold.

Updated.

"Payback" is a subject dearly loved by moviemakers, Hollywood in particular, but even Chabrol (a filmmaker Dercourt appreciates) has not approached this level of refinement. (As Dercourt rightly told us during his Q&A, Chabrol is as interested in critiquing the French bourgeoisie as he is in mystery or thrills.) You may find - as I did, given the situation - the thoughtless "slight" directed at one of the film's protagonists early on a truly awful thing. Yet by film's end, I suspect you will sympathize enormously with the other "heroine," beautifully played by the elegant Catherine Frot (La Dilettante, Chaos, Lucas Belvaux's Trilogy, Les Soeurs fâchées), who received a well-deserved Cesar nomination for this role. There is almost no French actress I would rather watch than Frot; she can be so utterly different, always believable and intensely interesting to observe.

Dercourt, in his Q&A (one of the more charming I can recall at Rendez-vous; it seemed as though he and his audience could have spent the entire day together), explained that he preferred to "erase" - leave some blank spaces in his narrative - so that viewers could fill these holes in the way they preferred. This can be tricky, depending on how much is left out and where. To my mind, this writer/director has achieved a fine mix of what's-there and what-isn't. Going over the plot points, post viewing, and trying on various scenarios for these "blanks," I found that one worked as well another - which left me even more satisfied by this lovely, chilling chamber piece of a film (which has been picked up for distribution by Tartan Films).

Update: Acquarello calls The Page Turner "a distilled, understated, and elegantly realized psychological tale of fragility, revenge, and manipulation."

Posted by dwhudson at March 4, 2007 8:06 AM