Catherine Breillat has made a scorching – or fairly tepid – mess of this remake of the very current Danish erotic thriller Queen of Hearts, and it’s not instantly clear why precisely she felt she wanted to direct her personal average model. The modifications quantity to smudging the unique’s icy Scandi sheen, reducing its erotic pleasure, making the performances extra laboured and thus leaving the story’s important preposterousness dangerously uncovered.
The primary movie, from writer-director Might el-Toukhy, featured Trine Dyrholm as a sublime profession lawyer specialising in representing rape victims who has a passionate affair along with her teen stepson; that’s, her husband’s moody son by his first marriage. Now the motion is transplanted from chilly Denmark to sunny, summery France and Léa Drucker performs authorized high-flyer Anne, married to rich however uninteresting businessman Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), with two lovely adopted twin women. She has a sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), who lives regionally, has a much less glamorous and profitable life and is affectionately but shrewdly unimpressed by Anne’s pretensions.
When Pierre’s tearaway 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) proves to be unimaginable for his ex-wife to deal with, he involves dwell with Anne and Pierre, and Anne is affected by his tousled, pouting gorgeousness, his loneliness, his vulnerability underneath the sullen perspective and the way in which he walks round together with his shirt off, revealing a toned torso so completely different from her husband’s sagging paunch. Anne turns into – within the immortal phrases of Noël Coward – mad in regards to the boy. One factor results in one other, amongst them the realisation that Anne will be fairly ruthless in the reason for her personal survival. Her high-bourgeois life is proven by the way in which she stands round ingesting wine on a regular basis in her beautiful house, and the streak of potential rebelliousness is signalled by her open-topped sports activities automotive, which isn’t too sensible for ferrying a household round.
Breillat’s film rolls alongside capably sufficient whereas the affair is in progress, but it surely’s examined to destruction when issues go unsuitable. She shouldn’t be good at delivering the iciness essential to the story’s third act, happier as she is with the sunny, languorous sexiness of the amour fou. And the plot developments of the movie’s closing part, notably Anne’s final encounter with Théo, simply look foolish.
Breillat appears to have retreated from the uncompromising strategy to sexuality that she confirmed in well-known movies like À Ma Soeur!, and but appears uncomfortable within the Chabrol-type drama by which Isabelle Huppert may, underneath different circumstances, have performed the Anne function. Principally, Anne wants that Greeneian splinter of ice in her coronary heart. Drucker hasn’t received it – and Breillat’s film doesn’t discover a manner for her to get it.
