Iris (2016)
Directed by Jalil Lespert

Film Review

After helming two reasonably successful dramas - 24 mesures (2006) and Des vents contraires (2011) - and an ambitious biopic - Yves Saint-Laurent (2014) - Jalil Lespert widens his directing repertoire further by moving into genre territory with his first thriller.  A remake of Hideo Nakata's Japanese film Chaos (1999), Iris is a slick erotic thriller that seems to owe a great deal to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Brian De Palma's Body Double, without making much of an effort to forge its own identity.   It's the classic film noir set up, with a collection of familiar archetypes hopelessly enmeshed in a tangled web of deceit and deception, but Lespert obviously has fun playing with the familiar motifs and whilst his film is hardly original it is seductive and thoroughly enjoyable.

Iris owes a fair chunk of its dubious appeal to the colourful performances from the three lead actors, who have no trouble elevating the subject above its brazen trashy B-movie status.  Romain Duris, at his moodiest and most enigmatic, makes a suitably tough and charismatic noir hero, easy prey for the seductively sensual femme fatale Charlotte Le Bon.  Lespert also takes a leading role (the first time he has appeared in a film he directed) and is barely recognisable as a puritanical financier (he has been absent from the screen for far too long in recent years).  It's a perfect line-up for this sordid little tale of perversion and manipulation, one that has enough surprising twists and turns to prevent the film's derivative premise from being too apparent.  Pulling back from the ill-judged ostentation of his earlier biopic, Lespert shows a laudable restraint in his mise-en-scène, and this helps the film's credibility enormously.  Lespert hasn't proved himself the equal of Hitchcock yet but he is shaping up to be a remarkably versatile and competent filmmaker.  Iris is his most stylish film to date.

Film Synopsis

One day, Antoine Doriot, a wealthy banker, takes his wife Iris out for a meal at a restaurant in the heart of Paris.  As he settles his bill, Iris steps outside to wait for him.  When Antoine leaves the restaurant his wife has disappeared.  A few hours later, he receives a telephone call from a stranger informing him that Iris has been kidnapped and will only be returned to him if he pays a ransom of half a million euros.  The police are soon on the trail of the missing woman, with captains Nathalie Vasseur and Malek Ziani leading the investigation.  The obvious suspect seems to be Max Lopez, a divorced father and garage mechanic who owes a large sum of money to Doriot's bank. What Antoine does not know is that the abduction was a charade conceived by his wife to extort money from him...