Crime d’amour (2010) - film review

In the sterile offices of a large multinational company, Isabelle works for Christine, a powerful woman whom she greatly admires.  Certain of her authority over her young protégée, Christine decides to lure Isabelle into a perverse game of seduction and domination.  But the game goes too far...

In what would prove to be his final film, Alain Corneau makes a welcome return to the genre which first established him as a filmmaker in the 1970s, a taut psychological thriller with a distinct edge of film noir stylisation.  In many ways, Crime d’amour is Corneau’s most interesting film in almost a decade, combining a cynical exploration of the harsh corporate environment - previously seen in the director’s Stupeur et tremblements (2003) - with a sinister murder mystery, in the best tradition of the classical French polar.  Whilst the film can hardly be described as an unqualified success (the narrative is painfully uneven and prone to cliché whilst the film itself is over-stylised), it is, overall, a compelling and enjoyable parting shot from one of France’s most highly thought of filmmakers.

The first half of the film is easily the best, offering a chilling portrait of office politics which many spectators will find disturbingly familiar.  This concentrates on the increasingly sadomasochistic relationship between the two female leads, played by Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier.  Thomas is superlative as the ruthless dominatrix businesswoman, ruling her little empire with majestic self-assurance and effortless cunning, looking scarily like a hybrid of Margaret Thatcher and Servalan from Blake’s Seven, with a hint of Snow White’s wicked stepmother thrown in for good measure.  A malignant man-eating spider at the heart of a corporate web, Thomas ensnares her victims with relish, before munching them up as she might a finger buffet.  Ludivine Sagnier can hardly hope to compete with such a full blooded performance and is somewhat less convincing as the seemingly innocent Lolita- turned-Machiavellian assassin.  Although Sagnier looks increasingly out of her depth as the film progresses, her early scenes with Thomas provide a fascinating study in psychological power play and convey some sense of the brutal inhumanity that pervades today’s corporate culture.

After an extremely promising beginning, the film soon starts to unravel and by its midpoint the plot has strayed too far into the realm of the implausible to be remotely convincing.  Corneau’s ham-fisted attempt to patch over the weaknesses in the narrative by inundating us with a surfeit of unnecessary stylisation merely makes things worse.   By this stage, Sagnier’s performance has become pretty unbearable and the flashy stylistic embellishments (including some pointless and highly irritating flashbacks) merely reinforce the impression that the film has run out of steam and ideas.  The last twenty minutes consist of little more than a mechanical attempt to maintain a sense of mystery which isn’t really there, and consequently are something of an ordeal to get through.  Crime d’amour is by no means Alain Corneau’s worst film, but if only it had restricted itself to being a portrait of corporate venality without resorting to murderous intrigue and excessive stylisation it could easily have been one of his best.

© James Travers 2010

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