The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime)

 

Director François Ozon

Ozon with Rebecca Marder and Nadia Tereszkiewicz

Ozon with Fabrice Luchini and Isabelle Huppert

THE CRIME IS MINE (Mon Crime)            B                                                                      France  (102 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: François Ozon

Doing justice has nothing to do with what’s just.                                                                          —Judge Gustave Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini)

Following the earlier works of 8 WOMEN (2002) and Potiche (2010), set in the 50’s and 70’s, Ozon has crafted a third installment in a trilogy of films exploring the status of women, specifically “the hold men have over women,” where this may be France’s answer to the #MeToo movement, a campaign against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture in which survivors, led by the voices of women, especially public figures, share their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment.  In France, a person who makes a sexual harassment complaint at work is reprimanded or fired 40% of the time, while the accused person is typically not investigated or punished at all ("'Revolt' in France Against Sexual Harassment Hits Cultural Resistance").  The Harvey Weinstein scandal of sexual abuse allegations played a pivotal role in the emergence and global spread of the #MeToo movement in 2017, when more than eighty women accused Weinstein of sexual assault, harassment, and rape over a period of thirty years, where casting couch practices (soliciting sexual favors from a job applicant in exchange for employment) skewed the sexual politics of Hollywood, which normalized the behavior due to the prevalence of sexually aggressive men with positions of authority in the film industry.  While this serves as a backdrop to the film, Ozon has turned it into a hilarious sex farce moving at a breakneck pace, told with a light tone of sophistication and irreverence through the point of view of several enterprising women who turn tragedy into financial success beyond their dreams, with obvious allusions to Harvey Weinstein and his “invitations” for actresses to audition for him, which is just an excuse to sexually take advantage of them.  Freely adapted by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo from the 1934 French play Mon Crime by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil where the protagonists were husband and wife, it has twice been adapted into Hollywood screwball romps, featuring Carole Lombard in Wesley Ruggles’ TRUE CONFESSION (1937) and Betty Hutton in John Berry’s CROSS MY HEART (1946).  Set in a romanticized Paris during the 1930’s, it opens with a theatrical curtain rising, followed by an inert shot of a view across the pool leading to a massive estate, where we hear shouting in the distance before a frantic young woman rushes away in tears, making her way down a crowded city street bumping into people.  This is our introduction to Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a struggling blonde actress with her brunette friend Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), an out-of-work lawyer with no cases, sharing a cramped Parisian studio where they are forced to share a single bed.  Behind on their rent, they do a diversionary two-step dance with the landlord, a somewhat feeble-minded man, making short work of his true intentions to collect payment as he is easily distracted by the teasing manner of their fake histrionics, pleading poverty as if it was a virtue, always claiming they have the best of intentions.  Madeleine’s boyfriend is André Bonnard (Édouard Sulpice), the heir to a huge Bonnard tire fortune, making him an excellent marriage prospect and the answer to their problems, but he refuses to work or even accept money from his father (André Dussollier), so he’s really a layabout, of no help whatsoever.  While there is a hint of queer attraction on the part of Pauline for Madeleine, and are even shown bathing together, but nothing ever develops, as the actress seems oblivious to it.     

Making things worse, they are paid a visit by Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalès), who informs them that famous theater producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), the massively wealthy older man Madeleine met before her rapid departure, was found murdered, making her a suspect, as she was one of the last to see him before she left under questionable circumstances.  Describing him as a “dirty old pig” who wouldn’t stop grabbing her at an audition, willing to offer her a job only if she agreed to have sex with him, she quickly dismissed his offer, refusing to trade her body for a coveted role.  Undeterred by the news, the women quickly go out to the cinema, watching Billy Wilder’s first directorial effort, his only European film, MAUVAISE GRAINE (BAD SEED) (1934), a story about a good-for-nothing playboy (mirroring André) who enjoys a hedonistic lifestyle thanks to his father’s immense wealth and ends up joining a gang of car thieves.  Shot in France during Wilder’s migration from Germany to the United States when he was fleeing from the threat of the Nazis, the film stars Danielle Darrieux, one of the original eight women in Ozon’s EIGHT WOMEN, whose jazz-infused songs are heard throughout the film, Le bonheur c'est un rien Danielle Darrieux YouTube (2:56), like a ringing reminder of more innocent times and how quickly it was all forgotten, as the decade began with the Great Depression and ended on the brink of global war.  While the women are out, however, Inspector Brun sneaks back inside their apartment searching for evidence, finding a revolver that could end up being the murder weapon.  Earlier, a weary and emotionally despondent Madeleine feigned suicide with that same gun, “I’m a bad actress, you’re a bad lawyer, no one loves us.  Let’s be sensible and kill ourselves,” only to be deterred by Pauline, “No, it’s a beautiful day, and I have sandwiches.”  The overly biased investigating judge, Gustave Rabusset, an over-the-top Fabrice Luchini, the bewildered schoolmaster in Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), is quickly convinced of Madeleine's guilt, based entirely on speculation, like a shot in the dark where he’s literally connecting the dots hoping it actually leads to something.  Madeleine claims she rebuffed his unwanted sexual advances, finding him lecherously vile and pathetic, but fled when he tried to sexually assault her, and left while he was very much alive, and is about to denounce the judge’s theory, but Pauline holds her back, with the judge acknowledging that if she can plead self-defense, she may not be found guilty, as France has a history of leniency in “crimes of passion.”  The fact that she didn’t commit the crime feels irrelevant, as Pauline springs into action, suddenly finding herself a case, deciding to make the trial a symbol of male oppression and abuse of women, which quickly makes sensational headlines as a cause célėbre.  In a world where reality and fiction merge, it’s impossible not to see parallels to today’s scandal and social media-obsessed world, with people willing to do anything to become famous.  Madeleine gives the performance of a lifetime posing as a wronged woman protecting her virtue, with rehearsed lines and carefully selected costumes, where Pauline’s closing argument ends in a rousing feminist speech exposing the hypocrisy of French male society to the delight of the courtroom audience and the media, as Madeleine is acquitted and immediately becomes a major film and stage star, while Pauline’s career as a lawyer takes off and the two women move to a luxurious house in Neuilly.  Using theater as an existential metaphor, the film is about the duplicity of words and the endless motives of an action, with Ozon never forgetting that women, using femininity as a weapon or tool, can be formidable manipulators to satisfy their lofty ambitions, where achieving justice can be achieved through means that aren’t necessarily based on fairness or truth, often resorting to a hall of mirrors and camouflages. 

A satiric comedy about misogyny and the abuse of power, the film is essentially an exploration of the dynamics of power and the complicated status of women, continuing themes explored in Ozon’s Peter von Kant (2022), a gender reversal re-interpretation of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) (1972).  Ozon adroitly frames anti-feminist positions in sophisticated settings, where all the male characters are fools, either deluded or ridiculously pompous, while poking holes at a corrupt judicial system, as the female characters shine in triumph, like voices of liberation.  Playfully mixing together elements of theater and film, with opulent sets and smart staging, the film is a battle of wits, flaunting a biting feminist edge and campy humor, suggesting violence was often the only way women had to evade sexual harassment, reminding viewers that women in France did not have the right to vote until the postwar elections of 1945, could not marry freely, or even have their own checking account, where the road to success lay in the traditional role of marriage or in being someone’s mistress, an option these women abhor.  Just as the film begins to luxuriate in its rags-to-riches success story, Ozon introduces his most deviously wacky character in the form of scene-stealing Isabelle Huppert as eccentric silent film star Odette Chaumette, arriving in a flurry of chaos, draped in furs and feathers, with wonderfully absurd flaming orange hair that resembles a Toulouse-Lautrec poster.  All remember her former glory, like an homage to famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt, still dressed in turn-of-the-century theater attire, but she’s disappeared from public prominence, and now returns with a vengeance, claiming she’s the real murderer, and that these women have stolen her thunder, manipulating the headlines into successful careers, demanding recompense or she’ll spill the beans, exposing them as frauds while displaying a penchant for blackmail, ridiculously declaring with utmost sincerity, “The crime is mine!”  An over-the-top screwball comedy that plays fast and loose with the facts, the theatricality of the original play has taut, witty lines, accentuated by rapid-fire dialogue and dizzying flashbacks that feel more imaginary than real, with Ozon playfully adding contemporary themes.  At the end of the film, Madeleine and Odette combine forces to star in a play recreating the crime we did not see at the beginning, thumbing their noses at rampant sexism, mercilessly mocking entrenched bourgeois manners, accentuated by the acidic realism of black and white newsreel clips of famous female criminals of the 30’s, like the infamous Papin case, Christine and Léa Papin, the story of two sisters thought to have had incestuous relations.  Employed as maids, subject to written detailed instructions demanding perfection that would pass the “white glove test,” they killed their employer and her daughter in a particularly brutal manner, gouging the mother’s eyes and mutilating their bodies with a kitchen knife, the source material of Jean Genet’s The Maids, with many identifying the crime as a symbol for class struggle, also Violette Nozière (murderer), a French woman who accused her father of sexually abusing her, but was convicted of murdering her father, poisoning her parents with barbiturates, but her mother miraculously survived.  These gruesome events punctuate the otherwise richly colored action, as do references to the music and popular film culture of the 1930’s.  Huppert, by the way, played Violette Noziėre in Claude Chabrol’s screen adaptation VIOLETTE (1978), winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, so her presence is no mere coincidence, while Luchini also had a small role in that film.  With lavish period costumes and art deco sets, the lush scale of the film is much more extravagant than typically minimalist Ozon films, with a dazzling medley of images and sounds, where it’s clear they had a riot making this film, with Ozon back to his mischievous ways.  

A Christmas Memory - made for TV

 

original draft of opening page

Director David Perry

Author and narrator Truman Capote

Capote as a young child

Capote kissing Geraldine Page at a party

A CHRISTMAS MEMORY – made for TV             A                                                           USA  (51 mi)  1966  d: David Perry

Imagine a morning in late November.  A coming of winter morning more than thirty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town.  A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it.  Just today, the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

Among the better Christmas movies to play on television, where this was an annual holiday event in the late 60’s, right alongside annual screenings of Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), which was a holiday staple before it was snatched up from private domain, or Menotti- Amahl and the Night Visitors, 1955 YouTube (46:13), a film that always used to play on Christmas Eve.  Originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956, A Christmas Memory (a christmas memory. - now voyager.) remains one of Truman Capote’s most anthologized short stories, one that Capote called his personal favorite and his most perfect work.  Part of a circle of American writers that included Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Terry Southern, James Jones, and many more, Capote’s work reflects America of the late 1940’s and 1950’s, deeply engaged with the social anxieties of the postwar years, as his writing captures the isolation, marginalization, and persecution of those who deviated from or failed to achieve white middle-class ideals and highlights the artificiality of mainstream idealizations about American culture.  After publishing his first novel in 1948 at the age of 24, Other Voices, Other Rooms, he was already being compared to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.  Elevating the art of the novella, Capote was as well known for his lifestyle and flamboyant mannerisms as he was for his novels.  With a versatile career as an author, playwright, screenwriter, and actor, his literary style ranged from an early take on Southern Gothic to comedy, while revolutionizing the genre of true crime with In Cold Blood (1967), yet his extensive use of description is nothing short of mesmerizing, informing us of a writing technique that would insure a timelessness in his works, “One, never use slang, it dates your work and you want to always make it classic, two, never take notes, and I forgot the third one, but I have it somewhere in my notes.”  Drawing on his youthful experience in rural Alabama when his mother left him with relatives while she looked for work in New York City, one of the few relatively secure periods in an extremely unstable early childhood, this is an idealized recollection of a remembrance of a happy childhood, not unlike Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales (A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas, free ...), recorded by Thomas in 1952, Dylan Thomas - A Child's Christmas in Wales, A Story YouTube (19:52), while Capote reads his own story in 1959, Truman Capote Reading His "A Christmas Memory" - Original ... YouTube (37:00).  While the story appeared earlier, and was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963, it was this made-for-television release that originally aired on December 21, 1966 on ABC Playhouse, eloquently narrated by Capote himself in that distinctive high-pitched nasal whine, that established the story’s enduring popularity, where perhaps no other piece is as fondly remembered by so many.  The original production was in color, but subsequent broadcasts were in black and white.  This ode to the American South is what Terence Davies achieves in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992).  Set in rural Alabama during the Depression in the 1930’s, this tender and strangely personal story of a seven-year-old boy named Buddy (Donnie Melvin) and his aging cousin’s holiday traditions was made into an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television movie starring Geraldine Page as his older cousin in her 60’s who is never identified by name, but only as “my friend.” 

The nostalgic mood has prompted some critics to dismiss the story, including playwright Tennessee Williams, who characterized the story as saccharine, overly sentimental, or even repulsive, though Capote himself described it as a catharsis which helped him to deal with his experiences as a child in the South.  It contains darker elements such as loneliness and loss, poverty, social isolation, sorrow, and death, which demonstrate that the innocence of childhood may protect young people from the elements of the human condition, but not remove them from it.  The story is also an example of a common theme in Capote’s writings, a friendship forged among social outcasts, many of which are eccentric women.  A largely autobiographical story, the idiosyncratic woman is based upon Nannie Rumbley “Sook” Faulk, the oldest of four adult cousins who was reclusive and many considered peculiar, perhaps even developmentally disabled, who suffered from the trauma of losing a close friend at an early age, but Capote describes as his best friend, providing a special warmth, as she was able to relate to him in ways others couldn’t, living in a small home with other distant relatives who didn’t approve of them or pay much attention to them.  What’s so incredible about the story is that it documents a relationship that many gay men encountered in their childhood, a loving, eccentric older female relative who takes him under her wing when his family and friends abandon him due to his “otherness.”  As the leaves fall in late November, a woman looks out the window and exclaims, “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!”  She is speaking, of course, to Buddy, an iteration of the author as a “sensitive boy.”  A surprisingly subversive ideological project at work, Capote’s presentation of male characters forces us to rethink gender roles, as Buddy revises the traditional coming-of-age narrative in which the male protagonist demonstrates their self-worth through masculinity, while Buddy romanticizes the traditionally female sphere of domesticity.  Geraldine Page is a national treasure, an iconic actress and one of the great legends of the American stage, only 42 at the time, yet playing a woman in her 60’s, refusing to wear any trace of make up in a heart-wrenching performance, beautifully described by the narrator, “In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except the funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry.”  From the maker of DAVID AND LISA (1962), which uniquely examines mental illness in a manner that is so distinctively humanist that French director Jean Renoir called it “a turning point in world cinema," this beautifully textured narrative bears a strange resemblance to Jason Robards in Fred Coe’s A THOUSAND CLOWNS (1965) made about the same time, as both fervidly avoid the tedious conventionality of ordinary life by transcending the tyranny of normalcy, where it’s all about the personal touches you bring to your life that make all the difference.  Genuine authenticity is the key, refusing to sell out to convention or bow down to the latest trends, remaining true to yourself, even if that means being shunned by others, where being a uniquely heartfelt version of yourself is what makes this storybook presentation so memorable, as there’s an art to being human.    

Who are our cakes for?  Friends.  Not necessarily neighbor-friends; indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we’ve met maybe once... perhaps not at all.  People who’ve struck our fancy.  Like President Roosevelt.  Like the Reverend and Mrs. J.C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter.  Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year.  Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o’clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud ‘whoosh.’  Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch.  Young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture – the only one we’ve ever had taken.  Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends?  I think yes.

This film marvels at the now forgotten custom of fruitcake baking and then sending them as holiday gifts through the mail, getting at the source of why it was such a special handmade gift during the Depression when people were too broke to buy conventional gifts, as it reminds us of why we give and what we have to be thankful for.  The visual acuteness and simplicity of style looms large in this film, as there is nothing artificial about this presentation, and nothing diluted either, where the authenticity of emotion and the surety of vision is in every line.  It’s so short, so sincere, and yet so touching, as it manages to balance the sought-after intimacy of the performances with Capote’s spare narration, conveying that youthful excitement where every day is an adventure bringing something new, where having a friend to share it with is all that matters in the world.  Buddy, his cousin, and their dog Queenie have developed a special relationship symbolized by the baking of fruitcakes on a cast-iron stove, foraging the nearby fields for fallen pecans, while scraping together spare change from contests they’ve entered or selling jars of jams, jellies, and preserves they’ve made from berries and flowers they’ve picked, which they use to buy all the necessary ingredients, including a rare bottle of whisky from the local bootlegger, a Native American Indian man named Haha Jones.  Having a few sips leftover, they decide to celebrate, even giving a few spoonfuls to the dog, becoming all warm and fuzzy inside, getting the giggles as they sing and dance around the kitchen, only to be rudely interrupted and scolded for their sinful behavior of setting such a poor example for a minor child by her devoutly pious sisters, who seem to have perpetually built-in frowns on their faces, as they simply never smile.  The small details on display are stunning, as “his friend” is genuinely hurt by their accusations, weeping that night in bed, never wanting to be the cause of anyone’s unhappiness, so Buddy lifts up her spirits by reminding her they have to go cut down a tree the next day.  But it has to be the right size, one tall enough that Buddy can’t reach up and grab the star sitting on top, so they cut out decorations from colored paper and tinfoil and sprinkle the tree with shredded cotton, making it look like snow.  Buddy makes his cousin a kite out of old newspapers, and he suspects she is making him one as well, just as they did last year, as their annual tradition is flying kites together on Christmas day, offering them a sense of joy and liberation, even if only for a brief moment, which seems to place them perfectly in harmony with the surrounding cosmos lurking so far beyond.  While there is a cheeriness about the untainted bond between them, this is also a sad and increasingly poignant tale, as anyone who has lost someone feels what Capote projects, the mixed emotions between that everpresent Christmas cheer and the grief that sits on your heart, becoming an elegiac love letter to Christmas and those lives we have lost.  We learn this was their last Christmas together, as a none-too-pleased Buddy was shipped off to military school the following year “by those who know best,” presumably to make a man of him, which he characterizes as “a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons.”  Told entirely in flashback, “home is where my friend is, and there I never go,” and there she remains, puttering around the kitchen, bringing these memories back to life, where this all happened some time ago, where it’s been years since she passed away, yet she remains alive through the evocative imagery of the story, as Buddy finds himself walking the grounds of his school and looking up at the sky, “As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”  Suffering from drug and alcohol abuse, habitually in and out of rehabilitation clinics, Capote died at the age of 59 in the home of comedian Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne in Bel Air, who read the final passages of this story at the eulogy, reminding us all of the transcendent power of the written word. 

Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory - Starring Geraldine ...  entire film may be seen on YouTube (48:15)