Crime d'amour (Love Crime)

[pro-bassoonist]

Alain Corneau's Crime d'amour a.k.a Love Crime (2010) has received a preliminary release date for the Gallic markets: December 6.

Daniel Kasman:
(mubi.com)

Corneau’s last film—he passed away but a few weeks ago—is a precise but unnuanced entry in the tired setting of corporate espionage, blackmail, power and workplace sexual politics. I think we need less of these films from the French, where it practically is a fully fledged genre, and more from the States, where the idea of female CEOs seducing or humiliating their subordinates can survive only within significantly less severe contexts of a film like Devil Wears Prada. (And god forbid we strip the genre of its female homoeroticism and see two men in a similar dynamic.) Corneau lays over this setting an intriguing take on Fritz Lang’s great Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, wherein Ludivine Sagnier attempts to get away with a crime by having all signs point to her. The story development is perfunctory and uninteresting, but the Lang connection flourishes, surprisingly, not in the idea of the film but rather inCorneau’s treatment of Sangier and her silent era saucer eyes. (Though the reason she gets cast in films like this is for her sexy body, by the standards of prettiness of the silent era, where the face is nearly everything, the actress would be fated to be some poor throwaway character starving to death or being burnt at the stake at the sidelines of a Gish sister’s central plight.) The film guides her through a suitably over the top combination of manic breakdowns and catatonic zombie states, as she first absorbs her boss’ (Kristen Scott Thomas) abuse and later turns it around on her, and Sangier’s amazing, naïve, blank eyes rivet the screen, pinning even the last shot to the immobility of her pupils and the vacant, suffering emotion so well known to the female neurosis of silent cinema and all but gone from it after the Method and the contemporary vogue for Minimalism (as I would casually term it) has cast this kind of hugely expressive style as “unnatural” or “unrealistic” by the vague standards of today’s audiences. And that Corneau would start the film with the kind of kinky sexuality one would expect from both the scenario (three way between boss, assistant, and the male co-worker they share!) and from Sagnier’s presence and then deflect his interest from the body to the face, and from there to the mind, makes Love Crime a far more interesting film than it should be, and likewise points to how better still it could have been.

Pro-B

[Rockysds]

Does this release have English subtitles?

[Jarfa]

Originally Posted by Rockysds

Does this release have English subtitles?

Guess not, only french audio