Anna M. (2007) - film review

Anna M. is an unassuming young woman who lives with her mother and spends her days carefully restoring manuscripts for the Bibliothèque de France.   Paris is full of women like her – anonymous, inoffensive spinsters who live a simple life without ambition or incident.  But, one day, her life takes a dramatic change for the worse.  On a mad impulse, she throws herself in front of a car.  When she regains consciousness, she is in hospital, attentively cared for by Dr Zanevsky.  Anna mistakes the doctor’s professional attention for affection and imagines that he is in love with her.  In truth, Zanevsky, a married man, has no interest in her other than as a patient in his care. Anna’s childish fancy soon turns into a dark obsession when her intrusions into Zanevsky’s life become increasingly insistent and threatening...

For his third full-length film in just over a decade, director Michel Spinosa immerses us in the harrowing world of a vulnerable young woman who succumbs to an attack of erotomania, a rare condition in which the subject wrongly imagines him or herself to be loved by another and develops an extreme fantasy obsession.   In contrast to Spinosa’s previous two lightweight offerings – Emmène-moi (1994) and La Parenthèse enchantée (2000), Anna M. is a thoroughly absorbing mix of drama and thriller that vividly conveys the trauma and misery of those who get caught up in this nightmarish derangement.  The poet William Congreve was perhaps understating the case when he observed that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. 

Both the title and subject of Anna M. instantly call to mind François Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), which tells a very similar story, but in a historical setting which creates a distance between the tragic heroine and the spectator.  By contrast, Spinosa’s film is set in a world that we can all relate to, hence its impact is somewhat greater.  The film’s extraordinary power lies in Isabelle Carré’s devastatingly realistic performance, which gives a stark visceral edge to the drama and makes the character she portrays both sympathetic and terrifying, often in the same shot.   With a surprising mastery of his art, Michel Spinosa delivers a film that is both utterly compelling and deeply disturbing, a reminder that the same passion which can inspire the noblest and most beautiful of human sentiments can also have a monstrously ugly side.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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