Pour Elle
Film: Pour Elle
Director: Fredn Cavaye
Starring: Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger
Runtime: 96 mins
Rating: ***
Never has a film been more aptly named. From the opening of Pour Elle (Anything for Her), Julien’s every action is governed by his increasing determination to help his wrongly accused wife escape from the justice system which has so dramatically failed them. Such drive makes his increasingly erratic behaviour plausible and understandable as his desperation drags him into a criminal underworld which he’s fully unprepared for. Whilst the film’s engaging, if you’re hoping for France’s latest top-notch ‘haunted-couple’ thriller from the same stable as Caché and Ne le dis á Personne, you’ll be disappointed.
As everything collapses around him, Julien’s anger and grief compel him to turn away from the law and enlist the help of an unlikely prison-escapee-turned-trashy-crime-novelist and a gang of overtly suspicious-looking criminals. Pour Elle is really a one-man show, however, and Lindon successfully captures the frantic loneliness of his character. Kruger is similarly strong, and scenes between them have a gut-wrenchingly dismal edge – their chemistry becomes the highlight of the film. Other characters are similarly grounded in the film’s tragic premise, and Julien and his father have that delightfully understated communication that can only be celebrated on film.
Soon deviating from its gritty, Scorsese-esque opening, Pour Elle becomes a sentimental exploration of the destruction of this family’s life which, though a little over-egged, seems fully authentic. The film is sufficiently moody, but production quality takes a back-seat: it’s a conscious decision to present the film in grim greys, but the film still lacks artistic flair. Instead, Cavayé relies on the plot to do the work, and this is the film’s downfall: the story simply isn’t robust enough to cope. The plot isn’t adequately fleshed-out or intricate enough to provide any brain-tease, and it undertakes a hard slog to what is ultimately an anticlimactic finish line.
If Cavayé’s intention is to turn away from ‘intelligent thriller’ and move towards a strategic, suspenseful and moving drama which explores the catastrophic individual consequences of a series of fateful occurrences – á la Crash and Babel – then it fails: the film isn’t particularly atmospheric, nor is it well-timed enough to emotively pinpoint critical moments in the story: coverage of the way in which Lisa is framed for murder is so brief and unexplored that it undermines the event’s significance. Such bizarre timing becomes a tool to gloss over weak patches in the plot, and, not sure where to go, the film fails to be the sophisticated, intelligent thriller it’s billed as.
To top it off, Pour Elle’s clichéd, cop-out ending leaves no ends tied up (which in a ‘thriller’ suh slow-burning should be a crime), but is no contemplative, open-ended triumph either, and comes close to undermining all the film’s positives. In truth, though, the film’s more mediocre than terrible. It’s graced with a strong cast and a plausible yet tragically coincidental premise, and Cavayé’s direction is watchable – just don’t expect it to live up to its predecessors.
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