Denis takes your typical revenge thriller plot – solitary man’s loved one(s) is wronged and he seeks revenge – and flips it on itself. The solitary man is solitary because he works on tankers. His family is hurt by a suicide – not, on its face, a wrong inflicted upon them. And the world he enters and tries to bring justice to – an extremely multicultural France where all the authority figures are immigrants and all the villains and victims are white – is one he doesn’t understand.
SPOILERS!!!
Everything is literally flipped on its head. The deliberate pace probably makes this infuriating for some people, but I was rapt. The hero falls in love with the wife of the man whose life he is supposed to be ruining. And as he learns more and more about what happened, we learn that his family – supposedly the victims in all this – were complicit in their doom. And it slowly builds to a borderline ambiguous climax that reverses the typical ending of these types of movies. (It’s a classically revisionist climax, worthy of an American renaissance thriller from the ’70s.) And then there’s the denouement: a shocking, awful, devastating reveal as to what really happened – what the hero was supposed to be avenging – that felt like a punch in the face.
Awesome.
9/10
- Directed by Claire Denis
- Produced by Brahim Chioua Laurence Clerc Olivier Thery-Lapiney
- Screenplay by Claire Denis Jean-Pol Fargeau
- Starring
- Vincent Lindon as Marco Silvestri
- Chiara Mastroianni as Raphaëlle
- Julie Bataille as Sandra
- Michel Subor as Edouard Laporte
- Lola Créton as Justine
- Alex Descas as Dr. Béthanie
- Grégoire Colin as Xavier
- Florence Loiret Caille as Elysée
- Christophe Miossec as Guy
- Hélène Fillières as Banker
- Éric Dupond-Moretti as Lawyer
- Nicole Dogué as Police Inspector
- Music by Stuart A. Staples
- Cinematography by Agnès Godard
- Edited by Annette Dutertre
- Production companies Arte France Cinéma, Canal+, Ciné+, CNC, Pandora Filmproduktion, Wild Bunch, ZDF/Arte
Distributed by Wild Bunch (France), Real Fiction (Germany) - Release date: 21 May 2013
- Running time: 100 minutes
Country: France, Germany - Language: French, English
- Budget: $3.9 million
- Box office: $660,000