Flashback: The right one is "Tell No One"

Google cache even preserves links. Hope they still work.

But I do have to tell you...

posted 07/14/08

...that the French thriller Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) is the most exciting European movie-movie I've seen since Run. Lola, Run--though this director, Guillaume Canet, has a richer, more sensuous style than Lola's hard-headed Tom Tykwer, perhaps a great one that is still evolving (the 2006 TNO was only his second feature). Even some people who love movies can be oddly blase about thrillers. They think they already know what they're going to get. This one will amaze even the jaded. __I've been suggesting in conversation (and on Facebook) that people who profess to love this movie but wouldn't be caught dead reading the Harlan Coban novel are guilty of Francophile snobisme. But even as I was watching it I had a feeling that a lot of the texture must have been added by Canet. People who can plot as deviously well as Coben tend to be rather short on poetry (Raymond Chandler, on the other hand, couldn't plot his way out of a paper bag).

Guillaume Canet is an actor turned director; actually a rising star who has yet to direct his third film. (I've seen only one of his star vehicles, Love Me If You Dare, in which he co-starred with g.f. Marion Cottilard; he also plays the highly significant small role of Philippe Neuville in TNO.) I never would have guessed this, however, because Canet avoids the common actor-director's tendency to indulge showy performers. In fact what's most impressive here is a rigorous understatement bordering on constraint, in which surging emotion is kept sternly under control, never quite overflowing its banks. (Except, in one case, in a witty long shot--and that turns out to be a bluff) An indication that the way to "transcend" the normal limitations of a genre piece is not to toss out or ignore the rules but to build on them as a strong foundation.

UPDATE: David Denby:
"Animated and charming with children and their parents, Alex, in the rest of his life, has become a stubborn, bitterly reserved man, opening up only to his sister's girlfriend, played by the English actress Kristin Scott-Thomas (whose French is good). [Francois] Cluzet, a mainstay of French cinema for more than twenty years, has thick dark hair and a fleeting physical and spiritual resemblance to Dustin Hoffman. Like Hoffman, he's a preternaturally attentive actor who seems to see more than other people do. The dramatic life of "Tell No One" is centered in Cluzet's eyes. ... "Tell No One" jumps all over the place but invariably returns to Alex's need for his wife, who, it turns out, was involved in relationships years ago that he didn't understand. Past events, like restless ghouls, keep barging into the present, and the many mysteries have to be explained in a long confession at the end. We know the material is artificially-even deviously-constructed, and we enjoy being manipulated by people who know what they're doing. But it's Cluzet's intense performance that makes this genre piece a heart-wrenching experience." (C.I: Micheal Blowhard.)

The image of a strong animal straining at a short leash is excellent. The constraints are Coben's tight complicated plotting and a highly controlled film style. This makes possible some virtuoso supense effects, including the only truly nerve-wracking scene I can recall in which a hero waits for something to download on a computer. But the tension between the feeling that wants to explode and the discipline that prevents this from happening could be defended not only as an aesthetic but also a moral choice.