Entre ses mains (2005)

Entre ses mains is a French thriller film first released in 2005, directed by Anne Fontaine.  The film is based on a novel by Dominique Barbéris and stars Benoît Poelvoorde, Isabelle Carré, Jonathan Zaccaï, Valérie Donzelli and Bernard Bloch.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Claire Gauthier is 30, married with a young daughter and works for an insurance firm in the town of Lille.  A good wife, mother and employee, she would appear to be the model of the modern woman.  And yet how easily is her life thrown into disarray when she meets Laurent Kessler, a vet with a moody temperament and flirtatious nature.  Having first visited Claire at her office to settle an insurance claim, Laurent continues to see her and, despite herself, Claire begins to succumb to his charms.  It soon becomes apparent that they both need each other, perhaps far more than they realise.   But then Claire becomes suspicious.  Over the past few weeks, several young women have been murdered in Lille, butchered with a surgical scalpel.  Is it possible that Laurent could be the killer...?

In her darkest, most compelling and most humane film to date, director Anne Fontaine takes the familiar psycho-thriller concept and transmutes it in a hauntingly lyrical love story that owes as much to Beauty and the Beast as it does to Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).  Fontaine had previously explored the perverse boundaries of desire in the deliciously ironic black comedy Nettoyage à sec (1997) and she treads similar psycho-sexual territory in Entre ses mains, hinting that an awareness of physical harm may be what draws her heroine to a psychotic killer.  It is a film that is as chilling as it is compassionate, and the suspense thrills come not from the knowledge that the heroine is in mortal danger (as would be the case in a traditional slasher movie) but from the unpredictable course the story takes as the two protagonists delve deeper into each other’s dark and mysterious inner world.  With its long tracking shots and lingering close-ups, Fontaine’s mise-en-scène has a distinctly Hitchcockian feel to it, creating a sense of mounting oppression, tightening like the grip of the strangler around his victim’s neck, and of repressed desires struggling to break free.  But there is also a darkly poetic quality to this film - most potently expressed in the elegantly shot exterior night sequences (even Lille can look beautiful) - and there is a sense that what we are watching is not a thriller but a fairytale, albeit one with very sharp teeth.

Perhaps the biggest shock that Entre les mains offers is its choice of male lead actor.   At the time he made this film, Benoît Poelvoorde was far more closely associated with comedy than drama, but here he was able to extend his repertoire and prove that he was just as adept with straight dramatic roles.  There is an unsettling ambiguity to Poelvoorde’s screen persona that makes him so perfect for the part he plays in this film.  Beneath the surface charm, the fragile and twisted inner-self is all too visible - the hands that can perform delicate surgery on a stricken animal can just as easily wrench the life from another human being.  Although he had serious reservations about the part, Poelvoorde turned in a performance of exceptional quality, easily his finest to date.  It is hard to imagine any other French-speaking actor today who could portray Laurent’s psychosis and fractured humanity as convincingly and with such incredible emotional impact.  Whilst he may be absolutely terrifying in the film’s darker scenes, Poelvoorde manages to make his character sympathetic and delivers a portrayal of heartbreaking proportions.  
 
Poelvoorde’s co-star, the magnificent Isabelle Carré, needs no introduction and is every bit as effective as the Beauty to his Beast.  In contrast to Poelvoorde’s character, whose split personality becomes evident within the first twenty minutes of the film, Carré’s remains strangely inscrutable, right to the end.  We can only guess at the reasons which drive Claire into Laurent’s blood-stained hands, but Carré offers plenty of clues through her mesmerising performance.  The perfect world in which Claire lives is also a dead world, a world of routine, order and mind-numbing boredom.  Laurent, perversely, offers her life, a chance to experience real sensations, to live real experiences.  Instinctively, she knows that Laurent is the killer, but this merely intensifies her feelings for him.  Is it the thrill of danger that draws her towards him, the anticipation of the knife on her throat, or is it compassion for a stricken animal, the same compassion that compelled Laurent to take up the career of a veterinary?  Carré keeps us guessing with her masterfully restrained, highly nuanced performance, but we never doubt that Claire and Laurent are attracted to one another by powerful forces, that Claire’s one true life begins and ends with the man who is as likely to kill her as love her.   In the original Beauty and the Beast story, the Beast is redeemed by Beauty’s unconditional love and both live happily ever after.  The outcome to Entre ses mains is somewhat different, implying that even love has its limits.  Not every fairytale has a happy ending.

© James Travers 2011

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