FRENCH FRISSON

Francois Cluzet in Tell No One.

Guillaume Canet’s intricate but adroitly engineered new French thriller Tell No One is something of a throwback to an older way of bringing off this kind of thing, as if the French New Wave had never rolled over European filmmaking. He hasn’t turned his movie self-referentially back on itself to convey social or political implications. He hasn’t indulged in a personal exercise in genre-exploding—to borrow New Wave director Francois Truffaut’s term for the appropriation and recycling of the American crime and suspense melodramas beloved by him and other French cineastes. They turned them into instruments to challenge the dominance of the carefully constructed, literary-flavored films that were prevalent in French cinema. Forty to 50 years ago, filmmakers like Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard refashioned American pulp fiction and mass-market crime movies into vehicles of aesthetic and social challenge.

Canet had no such purpose, nor was he mounting anything like an homage to the old (and frequently overrated) master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, to whose work this is certain to be compared. All Canet seems to have intended is a sleek, swift-moving film amusement that excites and grips an audience. It’s a relief that he’s succeeded so well in this because it’s been done badly a lot more often than not, especially by Americans who, after all, started the whole thing. You have only to consider Brian De Palma’s recent The Black Dahlia, and a number of former New Waver Claude Chabrol’s rather listless crime films over the last 20 years for evidence of the low level of general achievement.

Adapted from an American novel by Harlen Coben, Tell No One is for most of its 125 minutes an anxiety-inducing, paranoia-provoking trip. It begins with Alex and Margot (Francois Cluzet and Marie-Josee Croze), an early middle-aged couple enjoying a visit to the countryside haunts of their childhood. Lying on a float in a lake, he hears his wife cry out from the surrounding wood. After desperately swimming ashore he’s attacked and rendered unconscious by someone. Margot is discovered nearby, dead.

Eight years later Alex, a pediatrician working near Paris, is told by the local

police that two bodies have been discovered near the scene of the unsolved murder, and the case is to be reopened. It becomes clear to Alex that he is still under suspicion.

Then, an unattributed video that seems to indicate his wife is alive is sent to his home computer. Evidence casting doubt on his innocence begins to accumulate, and sudden violence strikes at someone near to him.

Canet keeps impressive control of the movie’s gradually tightening tension as he elaborates Alex’s plight and the puzzle of what happened years ago and why he’s being menaced now. The director’s manipulation of pacing and his movie’s expansive use of space are elegantly effective.

Cluzot, who comes across as a composite of Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman—his emotional charge is more like Hoffman’s—delivers a portrait of a humane, intelligent man placed under mystifying siege, one who holds something of himself from his associates and from us. The bilingual Kristen Scott Thomas contributes a nice turn as an aggressively self-confident lawyer, and Francois Berleand has a lightly sure touch as a pedantically methodical, but insightful detective.

Canet manages all this so deftly for so long that there’s a letdown when his admirably organized movie finally becomes top heavy with retrospective plotting and explanation in the last quarter-hour. Both Alex and we are subject to dense instruction, rather than being allowed to experience the action.

Still, Tell No One never entirely loses its hold on the material or on us. It’s a nifty piece of work—as good as or better than much of what Hitchcock turned out in the last 20-odd years of his career.