LOVE CRIME
Directed by Alain Corneau
Produced by Saïd Ben Saïd
Written by Corneau & Natalie Carter
Released by Sundance Selects
French with English subtitles
France. 106 min. Not rated
With Ludivine Sagnier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille & Guillaume Marquet
 

It’s not an everyday occurrence when a musical score so alters a film’s tone. In this case, the jazz-laced 1980s score by Pharoah Sander (with the composer on sax) contradicts the on-screen austerity. It conjures up images of a smoky late-night bar-meets-a Japanese tea garden. Heard first after the film’s vicious turning point, it’s a steady flow of steam heat that thaws Love Crime’s brutally cold and calculated corporate coups.

In the first scene alone, there are plenty of boundaries broken between senior executive Christine and her protégé Isabelle to give any human resources manager a heart attack. A late-night brain storming session in Christine’s chateau turns into what looks like a first date, with the boss first putting her hand on Isabelle’s shoulder, nuzzling her neck (purring “You smell good”), and then kissing her there, and that’s before she breaks out the Bordeaux. The arrival of the swaggering Philippe (Patrick Mille), their co-worker, interrupts the tête-à-tête. When he and Christine begin making out on the sofa, Isabelle discreetly lets herself out through the back.

As either a reward or a noblesse oblige hand-me-down, Christine choses Isabelle to take her place for negotiations in Cairo, accompanying Philippe, no less. A go-getter, Isabelle has an idea up her sleeve to clinch the deal. Just don’t tell it to Christine beforehand, Isabelle’s male assistant warns her, or she’ll pass off the proposal as her own since she only thinks of herself. Sure enough, Isabelle’s initiative wins the contract, and Christine seizes credit for the victory and is promoted to the New York office. But there’s a hint that Isabelle plays by her own rules. While on the business trip, she sleeps with Philippe.

Long hours and cut-throat competition; is this the France of the 35-hour work week? Yes and no. Although the high-rise office has a sweeping view of Paris’s La Défense district, the company, aptly named Barney Johnson, is based in the U.S. If you think film sends up our Protestant work ethic, the look of the sleek but minimal furnished and uncluttered office is more fashionably and rigidly Japanese, by way of the movies, than the non-descript American cubicle culture. (A koto instrumental that blends in with the saxophone solo now makes more sense.) And when we peek inside the muted-toned homes of Christine and Isabelle, both have set everything in place just so, not an inch out of place. Christine’s indoor swimming pool, lying underneath a looming statue of Buddha, should inspire countless boutique hotels around the world. (Maybe director Alain Corneau still has Japan on his mind; a Tokyo corporate den was the setting of his 2003 film Fear and Trembling.)

Best known internationally for his musical biography Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World), Corneau, who died last year, shot this psychological cat-and-mouse in a traditional, classic Hollywood style: single takes of medium two shots with minimal camera movement. Underlying the unhurried and exact storytelling are red herrings, mounting tension (thanks to the doling out and withholding of information), and cool performances, though the economical script gives a moment here and there for Christiane and Isabelle to drop their masks and explode. As contemporary thrillers go, it’s one of the more tightly constructed.

What takes the sting out of the retro-catfight between the two colleagues-turned-competitors—the older successful brunette vs. her younger petite blond—is the ambiguous nature of their relationship, which is not exactly facile to pin down, and this vagueness carries over to the film’s title, which promises a hint of the salacious that the film is too tactful, not unlike Isabelle, to deliver. Exactly who’s in love with whom and in what way? Don’t expect the passion of the hot and heavy sort. The film’s is too serious-minded and decorous to wallow in the tawdriness of Black Swan, with its young female striver melting down. And no in way does it have anything like the light satiric tone or tentative bonding of The Devil Wears Prada, another film Love Crime has been strangely compared to.

However, the film quietly points out the pressure place on both women, the only ones in the company’s upper-management. In fact, we see no other woman involved in the boardroom battles. Prim and preppy, Isabelle looks like she’s like a Seven Sisters undergrad on her way to tea (say au revoir to actress Ludivine Sagnier’s image as the often-nude nymph in Swimming Pool), and Christine favors slimming pants suits that are elegant yet don’t standout, blending in non-threateningly among the dark suited suits in the office. And more than once Isabelle, who’s just shy of 30, is praised by her gosh-golly American boss as the “perfect woman.” She fits that patronizing description on the outside—beautiful (no matter what Christine may say), intelligent, poised with a steel trap of a mind filled with facts, figures, and counterproposals. But he hasn’t seen her fall apart like we in the audience have.

Appropriately, the take-charge Christine dominates her scenes, a combination of both Kristin Scott Thomas’s star wattage and Christine’s morally blind self-confidence. Christine almost convinces you that stealing a colleague’s ideas is not a form of betrayal but part and parcel of teamwork. (If she would apply the same amount of thought and preparation to humiliating Isabelle as she does to her work, she could rule the world.) Yet there’s a danger of lower than expected results when Thomas is off screen. The script by Corneau and co-writer Natalie Carter deliberately keep Christine at arm’s length, lest she overwhelm the story. The film focuses instead on the transformation of Isabelle. However, Sagnier’s performance ranges from the phlegmatic to the hysterical. Understandably, Isabelle is walking road kill, flatten by Christine, but in scene after scene, she wallows in despair, going through the motions like a somnambulist. However, that’s key to the film’s success as well. Sagnier’s performances remains guarded, her face rigidly set, but like a good mystery, the film offers more than one way to perceive her, and it keeps you in the dark on how she pursues her revenge on Christine. It’s only after the fact that Isabelle becomes more fascinating. The film paints such a bleak picture for her with insurmountable odds that I was hooked, willingly giving into the film’s crafty manipulations. Kent Turner
September 10, 2011