Movies Reviews

Love Crime – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Sep 1, 2011, 1:10 GMT

Ruthless executive Christine brings on Isabelle as her assistant, and she takes delight in toying with the young woman\'s innocence... ...more

A sexy exploitation film that mixes the audience into a clever torte of intrigue with a frosting of Schadenfreude.

The last film of iconic French director Alain Corneau, “Love Crime” combines the deadly mix of corporate money, power and sex in a potboiler keeps the audience on the edge for its full 106 minutes.

The screenplay is thoroughly entertaining although the viewer has to overlook the rough spots in the plot and appreciate the lushly choreographed blood sport of corporate executives throwing each other to the sharks.

Alain Corneau’s life, ended by cancer last summer, left a body of work that includes the seven-Cesar winner “All the Mornings of the World” (“Tous les matins du monde”) in which he directed Gérard Depardieu. This film is more crowd pleaser than Cesar winner and a suitable epitaph for one of the world champions of entertainment.

A full-blown story of corporate greed and avarice, this movie does not waste a minute attempting to correspond to reality. Lead actors Ludivine Sagnier and Kristin Scott Thomas team up with Corneau to write a visual essay of everything that could possibly be sick, disjointed and nihilistic about corporations and the people who run them.

Although the story itself contains not a shred of humor, at some point the audience finds itself standing back and simply laughing aloud. Corporate worker bees in the crowd turn to one another and exclaim, “Do you really work with people like that?”

As the film transitions from reality-TV expose, to exploitation satire, the audience must suspend more and more disbelief. Even so, the production is too good to pass up. One wants to be a part of this thrilling world, dripping with jewels and bereft of moral hamstrings. This is real freedom. Plus, you get to live in the most marvelous apartments.

Isabelle (Sagnier) is the girl Friday for seasoned executive Christine (Scott Thomas). Christine has grown up from the new girl on the block to the flesh-eating amazon in the corner office.

Bagging a string of successes while bucking all odds she fears nothing and no one. Men and women alike do not have to be told to serve her; they serve her instinctively. Those under her feel her orders coming from their corporate genes. Like Moses with the tablet, she is the business world’s burning bush.

Christine has a secret she never shares. She is getting old and the ideas are not coming any more. She has to rely on the young-bloods under her to stay on top of the game. They have the minds and she has the ruthless cunning.

For several years, she has been taking bits and pieces from her assistant Isabelle to perk up her aging executive bag of tricks. Isabelle is starting to see the light and it is not the light of the Sermon on the Mount, it is the light of Dante’s Inferno. With the loyal support of her young, attractive, male assistant, Isabelle starts doing some business of her own.

After a couple masterful pieces of public humiliation using her marvelously brainless boy-toy husband Philippe (Patrick Mille), Christine succeeds in driving Isabelle more or less barking mad. This is when the film starts to veer away from a believable trajectory.

The characters become avatars in a fantasy world where international corporations are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the leaders therein are possessed with evil spirits that are beyond exorcism.

What follows is a whodunit sequence that is as entertaining as it is unrealistic. If the viewer is still in the audience, he or she is hooked. They want to see more, no matter how contrived. Specifically, they want to see the fat cats at the top of the food chain get what they deserve. They want to be reassured that it is OK to be at the bottom.

An exploitation film, yes, but one that steadily draws the audience into its web of fast-footed treachery. The pacing of the tension and action is perfectly managed, even as the technical details fall victim to the ham-fisted treatment of the, obviously, non-police savvy screenwriters. This not “The Closer.”

In fact, it is not even “Columbo.” Nobody would fall for the creaky structure of alibies left in the trail of the murderous killer. Or would they? In this film, they seem to believe it all. In the end, we go along for the ride.

Great modern film noir cinematography and creepy soundtrack make this film a winner, even if we have to look away now and then.

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Directed by: Alain Corneau
Written by: Alain Corneau and Nathalie Carter
Starring: Ludivine Sagnier and Kristin Scott Thomas 
Release Date: September 2, 2011
MPAA: Unrated
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Country: France
Language: French and English
Color: Color