Passage à l’acte (1996) - film review

To clear his mounting debts, psychiatrist Antoine Rivière has to juggle his career as a writer with the need to take on as many patients as he can.  His latest subject, Edouard Berg, proves to be more of a mystery than most.  When Berg confesses to having murdered his wife, Antoine is at first dismissive, but then changes his mind when his ex-wife is threatened by a stranger. Certain that Berg is playing a dangerous game with him, Antoine starts to pick up the threads that will lead him to the truth…

Francis Girod directed this unusually cerebral thriller, a creepily dark film which explores the shortcomings and potential dangers of psychoanalysis.   There’s a splendidly introspective performance from Daniel Auteuil, but the film really belongs to his lesser known co-star, Patrick Timsit, who is appropriately chilling as the central villain of the piece.  Whilst the film manages to hold the spectator’s interest, the complexity of the narrative is a bit of a turn off, as is the fact that the plot becomes increasingly implausible as things progress.  The film may have worked better as a black comedy, along the lines of Grirod’s better known work Le Trio infernal (1974).  As a straight thriller, Passage à l’acte is not a bad example of its genre, but the direction feels heavy-handed in places and, on reflection, the story is more than a little contrived.


© James Travers 2005

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