Love Crime Dir. Alain Corneau

[IFC Films; 2011]

Styles: crime
Others: Match Point

I have encountered a slight difficulty in writing an impartial review of Love Crime because my suspicion that it was written “backwards” from the second act was virtually confirmed by statements from its co-writer and director, the late Alain Corneau, in an uncited interview handily included in a press kit: “I have had the basic idea in mind for a long time. It is one of what I have fun calling ‘my little Fritz Lang labyrinths[…]: after you have committed the perfect crime, of which you will definitely be suspected, how can you prove you are innocent by making yourself look guilty?”

Because the perfect crime requires the perfect victim, the first act of Love Crime is devoted to the construction of the character of Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas), a ridiculous “Cruella Deville” reimagined as the executive vice president of a food corporation. When she learns that her young, beautiful protege Isabella (Ludivine Sagnier) has been having an affair with her younger trophy boyfriend Philippe (Patrick Mille), she unleashes upon the young “innocent” a series of viciously calculated humiliations, in response to which Isabella formulates her perfect murder, which I will not spoil for you — and the movie is worth seeing for its final half alone; or, rather, the second half, which is an entirely separate film, is worth seeing.

Roger Ebert’s review of There Will Be Blood contained a very memorable, and for me formative, four-word sentence, one that I like to think of as a “perfect” criticism (if such a thing can exist): “[Daniel] Plainview lacks a ‘Rosebud.’” It was a simple — had it been uttered by a precocious child, his or her parent would have hardly batted an eye — but beautiful bit of carping: the truth is that villains are fairly easy to create if a true villain is little more than a nasty person. It’s easy to call upon our various stores of unpleasant encounters with disagreeable human beings to sketch any number of quite terrible, mean, and awful things and call them characters, but I’ve come to realize that the only truly “inexplicably bad” people we encounter in our lives are those whose badness cannot, given the brevity of those encounters, be explained by us: the film’s first half is by no means brief.

Given that Christine is its main antagonist, and a major character, the viewer may feel entitled to even a very weak attempt at an explanation for why she is so “totally insanely cruel,” but, alas, he or she will never receive one. As Cruella’s cruelty escalates, the viewer will really want one, may even think the filmmakers cruel themselves for neglecting to include one, will probably conclude that the character and the film might have benefited greatly from one. Everything about Christine is evil: she’s petty, greedy, duplicitous, jealous, spiteful, unloved, and loveless. But there is no “why,” and the result is not a creation of pure evil but an incomplete creation: her demise is neither righteous nor sad, it’s just a bit confusing because it’s never clear what, in the zeroth act, led to “what led to” it.

Not only is her cruelty an unquestionable reality of the world of Love Crime from the moment we enter it, but the mad, murderous romantic chemistry of Isabella and Philippe is neither explained nor rendered in any way believable: they quite literally exchange two words and get to it. Another slightly unforesightful choice was the casting of Sagnier: her character must undergo a marked transformation from brilliant, go-getting executive to love-demented, sedative-popping murderess, yet Sagnier seems naturally possessed of a dilatory, sleepy demeanor and the change is never really clear. (And I can’t get over the title.)

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