You may remember that I have written before of what a poor job Hollywood does these
days with the most basic task of any popular entertainment, which
is story-telling. Cinematic plotting, of the kind that used to be
the backbone of mysteries, thrillers and even comedies, is now
almost a lost art in American movies, where attitude and atmosphere
are everything and story, at best, an afterthought. But if there
should be someone in Hollywood who still recognizes the potential
of tight-plotting to draw an audience, he could do worse than study
Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One (Ne le dis a
personne), a French film based on an American novel (with the
English title) by Harlan Coben. The only problem is that the plot
is just a trifle too labyrinthine and the dastardly
conspiracy a little too reminiscent of American neo-noir,
in which everything tends to be facilely explained by some evil
rich guy and no further questions asked.
Because the plot is so central, and because it is so well done,
I cannot tell very much about the movie without giving too much
away. It begins with a couple, a doctor and his wife, going to a
remote cabin at a lake where they have been coming since they were
children. There they go for a late night swim in the nude. After a
little tiff, the wife, Margot (Marie-Josee Croze) goes back to the
cabin. The husband, Alex (Francois Cluzet), still on a raft in the
middle of the lake, hears her scream. He immediately dives off the
raft and swims to the dock. She screams again. He climbs onto the
dock and starts to run toward her, but is immediately hit with what
looks like a baseball bat and falls back into the lake. The screen
goes dark. Cut to eight years later. The doctor, a pediatrician, is
alive and practicing, but we are given to understand that his wife
was murdered, presumably on the night we have just witnessed, and
that he, the doctor, was at first himself a suspect. His story was
of having been knocked into the water (as we have seen he was), but
it sounds suspicious in view of the fact that he was found
unconscious on the dock.
Yet there had been insufficient evidence for a prosecution, and
a notorious serial killer with a distinctive modus
operandi (weird forms of mutilation with a knife, dead animals
near the body, etc.) had been convicted of her murder, as his usual
procedure had been followed. But although the serial killer had
confessed to other crimes, he had denied responsibility for this
one. Now, the doctor starts getting e-mails that suggest she is
still alive at the same time that the police are re-opening the
case of her murder, since two bodies have been dug up near the
murder scene, one of them with a key to Margot’s safe-deposit box
in his pocket. It soon becomes clear, both to him and to us, that
Alex is again under suspicion for her murder, and he has to go on
the run — both from the police and from a sinister group who are
watching him and remotely monitoring the messages he is getting on
his computer. It takes a long time for us to find out who they
are.
For what it is worth, the movie signals to us from the beginning
that Alex is innocent. We see him being knocked out on the dock and
into the water, just as he claims to the police he was. We also see
that he misses Margot terribly and has been unable to establish a
relationship with any other woman. He is naturally eager,
therefore, to follow up any lead he can that indicates she might be
alive. When the police produce photographs of her, found in the
safe-deposit box along with a gun and taken before her death, with
black eyes and bruises consistent with a severe beating, they again
leap to the conclusion that her husband must have been the
assailant. But they only spur him to undertake his own
investigation — both into the photos and into the circumstances of
her death — which could hardly be the act of her murderer.
He goes to talk to his father-in-law (Andre Dussollier), a
now-retired policeman who had been the first on the scene of his
own daughter’s death and had identified her body. Alex tries to
quiz him about the state of the body and what she had looked like
in death, but the father-in-law is extremely reluctant to talk
about it and tells him to leave. Soon afterwards, he is leaping
from the window of his consulting room as les flics close
in. The chase sequence is extremely well done, as are the
subsequent events as Alex is accused of another murder and
continues his investigations into Margot’s — and her apparently
secret life before her death — with the help of a criminal gang
led by a wonderful low-life called Bruno (Gilles Lellouche) for
whom Alex had once done a favor. To Bruno, whose sense of
honor-among-thieves only the French, probably, could now portray in
a movie with a straight face, this places him under an obligation
to go to the limit on Alex’s behalf. I liked that part a lot,
though some may find it hard to credit. In our cinematic culture,
it is brutality, not honor, which conveys verisimilitude in
villainy.
For the more superficial among us, myself very much included,
the film also features, in minor roles, what must be the two most
beautiful actresses d’un certain age in the world, Kristin
Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye. On the negative side, the
denouement is signaled, in general terms, a bit too far in advance,
and, when it finally comes, it is a little too drawn out — mainly
because the sequence of events is so complicated that it takes a
long time for M. Canet to explain them. Also, too much of the
explanation is told rather than shown. But the director should get
full credit for taking the trouble to explain them at all. Once
that could have been taken for granted in any movie, but not
anymore. The stunning success of The Dark Knight can be
seen as being, among many other things, a reminder that, in
Hollywood anyway, explanations, like plots, have become
superfluous.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie and
culture critic. His new book, Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political
Culture, is published by Encounter Books, as is his previous
book, Honor: A History.
