. . . I wrote a bit about this French thriller by director Guillaume Canet, based on a novel by popular thriller writer Harlan Coben, after a screening at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, but I have no idea how to find my posting . . . anyway, this exceptional movie sort of vanished after SIFF, other than going on to become the highest grossing foreign language release in England last year, and I thought it was gone for good . . . but all things come to he who waits, and I was pleased to read a rave review by Stephen Holden in today's New York Times (in which he praises it as "'Vertigo' meets 'The Fugitive' by way of 'The Big Sleep'" . . . and adds "that is meant as high praise") that indicates it has finally surfaced and will, hopefully, begin a journey around the country . . . I don't want to say much about the neat plot, but the picture begins with a couple leaving their home in the French countryside and going down to a lake where they sit and begin an argument; the wife leaves in anger, the husband decides to stay, until he hears her scream; rushing to her aid, he is hit on the head, passes out, wakes to be told his wife is dead, she has been murdered . . . eight years pass, he lives alone, still obsessed with his dead wife; he receives an email message to go to a particular internet site at a particular time; it turns out to be a camera which is positioned at the entrance/exit of a Metro stop; he watches at the appointed time and sees his wife emerge to look at the camera, then go back into the tunnel . . . from here, it really takes off with our hero tracking down his wife while the police chase him all around Paris as they have found new evidence indicating he is his wife's murderer . . . anyway, this one is excellent, the direction is breathless in the good old fashioned way, while the acting is tops, with a supporting cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye . . .

New York Times Review

Couldn't agree more with Wade's (and the NYT) review. Search around for the region 2 dvd that's available.

Will do! :D

thanks Wade & Lenny! :)

Had the day off and caught an afternoon matinee of this. Saw it and liked it.

Some stories get told and retold so many times, in so many different periods, by so many different people that they break through the "cliche" glass ceiling to become something almost like folk tales. The pleasure in them is the pleasure of completion, of hearing the story told the way we need to hear it told. Certainly the basic structure of this has been around at least since John Buchan's The 39 Steps:

VERY MINOR SPOILERS FOR BOTH TELL NO ONE AND 39 STEPS


Our protagonist lives in world X, takes world X for granted, and then suddenly, either through his own choice or through another's, he's plunged into world Y, a darker, nastier sort of place. Equilibrium is reset by the end of the tale, but we're left with innocence lost -- world X is now revealed as a thin skin over the "true" world, world Y. It's a story about one of the great fears of Western Civilization, I think -- how long can it all last? It's the mystery/thriller equivalent of the post-apoc story.

I think.

I read alot of mystery fiction, and so guessed the plot twists pretty early, but that's no big deal -- fooling the viewer/reader is overrated, IMHO. (I think it's a legitimate artistic goal -- I just think it's an uninteresting one.) I could've done without the

YEAH, I GUESS THIS IS A SPOILER TOO


hoodlum who becomes our hero's muscle sidekick, but I suspect that's straight from the book -- it's an American hb cliche. (It's lazy, though.)

I did like Francois Cluzet a great deal here -- he bring immense vulnerability to the role, you get the feeling that if he hears one more bad piece of news he'll just shatter. His final scene is extremely moving.

With Kristin Scott Thomas, who remains surpassingly lovely and speaks fluent French, apparently (I'm envious!) (about the French -- I am surpassingly lovely myself) and a really nice foot chase sequence, a fairly unexplored action motif.

doug

Thomas (be still my heart) has lived in France for over 20 years, and was married to a Frenchman. She makes as many French films as English-language ones, and has apparently reached a career peak with one that opens here in October, I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG.

Question: There are plenty of foreign-language stars who cross over into English-speaking parts. But are there many English speakers who've wowed the foreign markets speaking a different language?

Well, there's Eddie Constantine who spoke French when he played Lemmy Caution in several French films.

And just this weekend, I watched DOGORA THE SPACE MONSTER (1964), in which American actor Robert Dunham speaks Japanese on camera (it's his own voice, too,--thanks to sync-sound). Although I don't know that he actually "wowed" the Japanese market. (Nick Adams, on the other hand, was an American star who starred in two Japanese kaiju films, but was dubbed in Japanese for the Japanese dub, while heard in his own voice in the English dub.) The Gamera films from the late '60s/early '70s often had Japanese-speaking westerners in them in major roles, usually kids, although I doubt any of them were professional actors beforehand. (Or afterwards.) Nor was Robert Dunham, who started out in Japan racing cars.

Does Lex Barker count? The former Tarzan was a major star in German films in the 1960s (pre-David Hasselhoff) but he was dubbed into German. (And I'm not sure the English dubs of his films ever featured his real voice.)

Finally, here's a clip of an American singing duo who had some hits in Japanese in the 1970s:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr0vw0c-_W8&feature=related


(Historical note: one of those girls was a student of Hedwig von Trapp, of the famous Trapp Family Singers.)

Thanks for the input. Jodie Foster spoke French in A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT, but isn't making a habit of it. Thomas has a half-dozen French credits on her resume and more to come I assume. (We get her on Broadway in THE SEAGULL this fall; Chekhov has never been so alluring...)

. . . I remember seeing Ms. Scott-Thomas in a Romanian movie called UN ETE INOUBLIABLE/AN UNFORGETTABLE SUMMER (1994) in which her character speaks Romanian throughout - I thought she must have been dubbed, then read she had actually learned enough of the language to speak the part herself . . .

Caught this at the Egyptian here in Seattle last night, and agree that this is a solid, old-fashioned, mainstream puzzle-thriller. It reminded me a little of last year's GONE, BABY, GONE, although without the ambiguous question of right and wrong. I loved the settings, especially the remote, forested countryside. Not the way I think of France! Very entertaining and engaging, even if the only discussion it generated with my friend afterward was whether the big explanation at the end really connected all the dots.

I thought of another one: Viggo Mortensen, who grew up in Argentina, and speaks fluent Spanish (I heard him do so at a roundtable for EASTERN PROMISES last year). He starred in Spain's most expensive production, ALATRISTE, in 2006, and supplied his own dialogue. But Thomas has him beat.

Do Laurel & Hardy count? They did their own foreign language versions of their comedy shorts in 1930-31, mostly Spanish, some French, but also German and Italian, all filmed with them doing their lines (phonetically) in the foreign language.

I can see that. I wonder who else did that?

Oh, and TELL NO ONE is a good, solid mystery, highlighted by a well-staged and fully coherent foot chase. Take that, superheroes.

Oh, and one more "Chunnel star," English and French: Charlotte Rampling.

HUGE SPOILERS CONTINUE

I think there's a little more to it than that. What is great about the film is the buried theme of class struggle. Alex is a doctor, but his father worked in the stables for Neuvelle, the rich horse breeder who sets much of the danger in motion, and his sister who adores riding, rides under his aegis as well. Granted, the family owns prime land so they cannot be too poor, but it is hinted at that by marrying into a family whose patriarch is a decorated police detective who is even closer to Neuvelle, that Alex has moved up a notch in the world. But consequently, his whole family is now dependent on staying in Neuvelle's good graces, more than he can possibly foresee.
Neuvelle of course, is a control freak who at one point confesses that when his son was a child, he could not bear to let him out on his own. He will spend money to cover up his homosexuality, his abuse of stable staff, and later on, who he believes are his murderers. Yet he always maintains an urbane, cultured manner, trying to pretend he is not a bully. By contrast, the petty thief who helps out Alex is open and almost unrepentant about his criminal nature, never pretends that he is otherwise. Yet Alex does not judge him, he simply does his job of keeping his child healthy.

Granted, the notion of comparing the relativity of criminals can also be a lazy Amerian stereotype, but I think in this story it has teeth because it demonstrates who Alex can put more trust in when the screws are turned.

I don't disagree with anything you've said -- it's just that I've seen this exact same dynamic a lot in modern American hb fiction. Hawk, Bubba, Mouse, and Pike all come to mind. And in all cases it's basically the same thing -- yeah, they're criminals, but they're more trustworthy than the Real Criminals of the book. And not always, but often in American hb fiction the Real Criminals are richer, more privileged, more upper crust -- it's a class thing.

That doesn't make what's here bad -- and I'm such a helpless Francophile I enjoyed seeing a French gangsta straight up. But it did make it pretty familiar to me.

It's "lazy" incidentally because it's also there to solve basic plot problems in these sorts of stories. To keep it general -- without giving away anything here -- there are moments where the hero's gonna have to kill somebody, or break in somewhere, or get in a fight, or something. It can be hard to create a character who's both smart enough to solve the mystery, verbal enough to spar with everybody, and action oriented enough to do all that. One trick writers use is to split that character off entirely.

To anyone who's read the book, incidentally -- am I right? Is this character in the book?

doug

Not too much to add here, other than that I saw this up near Lincoln Center on Sunday and want to add to the praise. It's actually a far more complex and intense thriller than Transsiberian, if not as exotic. Both films are wonderful responses to Hitchcock's concepts in story and story-telling. It was fun hearing a packed audience freaking-out in unison from the suspense and shocks. Highly recommended.

The wife was played by the same actress who was in Munich. Yes, that scene. (I'm avoiding spoilers.)

Geraldine Chaplin also did a recent Spanish language turn in The Orphanage.

I'm not in the habit of coming late to a movie (thanks a lot, MTA dispatch, for keeping me stuck in Times Sq forever) but I was a tad late on this one. It was during the swimming scene when I got to my seat. Did I miss much? What happened beforehand? Thanks.

Yes, Chaplin's another, soon to be speaking...something...as Maleva in THE WOLF MAN.

Not only is this character in the book, Coben's novels are full of characters like this. I'm going to be a bit more generous, as I think this sort of character not only introduces a bit of uncertainty to the plot, but is often used to create a bit of variety among the typically rich white successful central characters. Often it also acts as a reminder to the reader not to have any preconceptions based on class/race stereotypes.

It's hardly groundbreaking stuff, but Coben is a great craftsman within the limitations of the 'mainstream twisty kidnap thriller' form. It's certainly a bit strange that TELL NO ONE, which looks for all the world like a French movie, is the only adaptation of such a typically American writer.

. . . there was a nice article about TELL NO ONE on Public Radio today - apparently, the film sat around two years without an American distributor even though it had been a major hit everywhere in old Europe; finally a little company called Music Box based in Chicago took it and turned it into a major "foreign language" hit which is still doing great business with over 100 prints in circulation; they said word of mouth is really helping this one . . . nice to see it can still be done now and then . . .

Yeah, I've been following its box office, and it's approaching three million, which is a nice sum for a small bore foreign film playing a hundred theaters. I certainly hope that ends up being a nice profit for the distributor.

That's a terrific number. The only foreign-language pics doing comparable business in the U.S. now are the Oscar-winning THE COUNTERFEITERS, which is still playing as it hits DVD, and the Oscar-nommed MONGOL, both around $5 million gross. (The homegrown winner is THE VISITOR, at $9 million.)

TELL NO ONE joins PURPLE NOON, HIGH AND LOW, and a few Chabrol pictures as good foreign-made adaptations of thrillers written in English.

Don't forget YOJIMBO, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.

US DVD release on November 25th!

Bob, pay the 11 bucks and see it first run. Contribute! :)

YOJIMBO is a good addition to the list, which I'm sure has other entries.