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.  

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle

FOUR ADVENTURES OF REINETTE AND MIRABELLE (4 aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle)    B                     

France  (95 mi)  1987  d:  Éric Rohmer 

This is a delightful series of four short films, one of the most enjoyable and amusing in the entire Rohmer repertoire, unraveling with the conceptual detail of short stories, each starring the darling duo of Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) and Mirabelle (Jessica Ford), something of a variation on the theme of Rivette’s quirky adventurists, Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau)  (1974).  Another cinéma vérité film shot on 16 mm, blown up to 35 mm, it was allegedly made very quickly while Rohmer was waiting for sunset shots in his previous film Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986), using many non-professional actors in the cast who were given plenty of leeway to improvise, accounting, perhaps, for a more free-wheeling style than usual.  Set in a highly colorful scheme of bright pastels dominated by the color red, the work is a personality driven film, where the charming spirit of these two women is thrust to the forefront.  The stories themselves are vignettes dominated by smaller moments, not life changing decisions, the kinds of things they experience every day, where they each obviously have an impact on the other’s life.  Reinette’s younger, idealistic enthusiasm and zeal is countered by Mirabelle’s acerbic tongue, dry wit, and more laid back approach, where their differences are inevitably highlighted, yet their friendship endures, becoming extremely familiar after awhile, as if we grew up knowing them.    

The Blue Hour (L'heure bleue)

Opening in the beautiful empty spaces of a rural country road, Mirabelle pulls her bike off to the side of the road, but can’t fix her flat due to a tire puncture.  Reinette, who lives nearby, offers assistance, where we literally witness her repairing the puncture in real time, fast becoming friends, where Reinette offers her a place to stay for awhile.  Mirabelle is a Parisian on holiday with her parents nearby, but has never experienced the countryside, something Reinette is intimately familiar with, living in what Mirabelle describes as a hayloft which has been converted to her living quarters, offering plenty of space and light, essential ingredients for a painter.  Much of this is spent discovering the rustic charm of rural life, where people grow their own food to eat and raise livestock, where the chirping sounds in the air seem quiet compared to the noisy Parisian streets.  Reinette’s favorite sound, however, is the utter silence in the country that lasts for perhaps a minute, a pre-dawn transcendental moment occurring between darkness and light just after the night animals go to sleep and just before the day animals awaken, where you have to get up early to experience it.  Nonetheless, through a bit of perseverance, which also includes a wildly inventive dance number, they eventually experience the blue hour together.   

The Coffee-Shop's Waiter (Le garçon de café)

Leaving the country for the city, Mirabelle invites Reinette to be her roommate in Paris when she attends art school, both university students at different schools, where they decide to meet at an outdoor café after class one day.  Featuring the grouchy irritability of Philippe Laudenbach as the ill-mannered waiter, a guy who takes rudeness to higher levels, making the simple transaction of making change to a customer an act of indignation and outright refusal, refusing on the grounds the customer doesn’t have smaller bills.  While this is exaggerated farce, much like handing the waiter a hundred dollar bill for a cup of coffee, where the establishment holds the customer hostage and in contempt, it instead turns into an extended essay on morals and honesty, as Reinette insists she be taken seriously when she says she’ll pay, but as neither have small enough bills, they instead flee the scene, exactly as the rude waiter suggests they would. The verbal fireworks here grow repetitive, but they establish the high minded principles that the fiery Reinette lives by.   

The Beggar, The Kleptomaniac and The Swindler (Le mendiant, la kleptomane et l'arnaqueuse)

Reinette reveals she’s not so jaded as city cynics when she offers small change to needy panhandlers, which catches Mirabelle off guard, as there are so many on the streets, you simply can’t support them all.  Reinette claims her system is to decipher those in need and offer something she can afford.  It’s amusing afterwards to see Mirabelle filling the coffers of needy beggars.  Taking place almost entirely in a neighborhood grocery, Mirabelle appears to be considering shoplifting when she instead is surprised to see another customer blatantly steal an item and place it in her zip-up shoulder bag, taking even greater interest when she notices the customer being followed by store detectives.  This turns into a veritable Keystone Cops episode of classic misdirection, which is then discussed afterwards by the duo at home, where both offer surprisingly individualistic philosophic views on just what is considered grounds for righteous indignation, which is immediately put to the test when they meet Marie Rivière performing a con solicitation act which Reinette initially falls for and later wants to exact justice.   

Selling the Painting (La vente du tableau)

Reinette is a surprisingly good self-taught Surrealist painter, which means her lack of training actually offers her insight not shared by those painters who uniformly follow the teachings of others.  But she has a philosophy that art should be met with silence, that words come afterwards when attempting to fathom the subject.  After a non-stop talkathon by Reinette, where despite several hints to cease and desist, she’s all wound up and just won’t shut up, Mirabelle challenges her to a day of silence.  But when an art dealer calls (Fabrice Luchini) to offer an appraisal of one of her works, they concoct a plan to go into the gallery one at a time, hoping to get the best deal, where the results are surprising.  The audience knows something is up, but they haven’t a clue just what’s in store.  It’s a clever segment, made even more interesting by the dubious behavior of the unscrupulous dealer, where the element of surprise makes this an absurd, sleight-of-hand theater piece. 

In the House (Dans La Maison)

IN THE HOUSE (Dans La Maison)     B+               
France  (105 mi)  2012  d:  François Ozon 

While more lighthearted than the usual fare, Ozon has nonetheless crafted a smart and cleverly insightful comedy about the boredom and ennui of the middle class, a film that beautifully unravels though serial installments of an apparent neverending high school class writing assignment.  Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is the overly cynical and largely bored and disinterested literature teacher continually under the spell of Flaubert who has grown to hate the illiteracy of his students, coming to work with a giant chip on his shoulder, a pretentious know-it-all that continually degrades his students, where coming to work has become an exercise in futility.  As he’s reading some of his student’s papers to his wife, the engrossed listener is the perfectly respectable but utterly bourgeois Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who runs an art gallery owned by a pair of twins that have no interest in art and continually threaten to shut the place down.  The impression given is that this is a cultivated and sophisticated household, childless, no doubt, so that they could pursue their professional careers, where by now they have become accustomed to the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie, to coin a Buñuelian phrase.  As he reads examples of atrocious writing, one paper stands out and holds his wife (and the audience) in rapt attention, where a student describes his meticulously detailed plan to get inside the house of another fellow student, Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), offering to help with his math homework while he secretly inspects the premises.  We surmise the writer lives in a tiny claustrophobic dwelling in a congested, overpopulated part of town, while this house, viewable from a park right across the street, represents the dream home in the eyes of the writer, with two loving parents who proudly show affection, even in front of adolescent kids, something rarely seen these days.  What gives this paper a kick is not only that it’s an engrossing story filled with shrewdly discerning observations, but that it concludes “to be continued.” 

Germain immediately pulls this kid aside, Claude (Ernst Umhauer, somewhat in the manner of Michael Cera), and inquires about his motives, as he rather subtly is painting a sarcastic character portrait that gets disturbingly deep into the personal affairs of a fellow student, which could have negative repercussions if asked to read aloud in class.  Claude was only following the class assignment, so he claims, before nonchalantly dropping off the next installment.  Germain waits until he gets home where he and his wife literally devour the story for details and personal insight, becoming a prominent part of their lives, like a movie-of-the-week, discussed right alongside the various pitfalls of their careers.  To be blunt, the story is much more intriguing than anything either one of them has going for themselves, and they eagerly look forward to the next episode. Germain works with the kid after class, critiquing his writing, his motivation, while offering various books to read from his own collection.  In his eyes, at least one student shows promise, and the least he can do as a teacher is encourage him to develop his craft, though we all know the real motive is to read the next continuing chapter, as the kid churns them out like daily editorials, something one can count on and look forward to on a regular basis, becoming the one constant in their lives, even as everything else is falling apart.  Ozon places the audience in the same position as this couple, where we’re deliciously eavesdropping into the intimate affairs of another household.  Germain continually suggests that he use his imagination and take his narrative elsewhere, but Claude insists the only place he’s inspired is inside that house, where his writing style amusingly starts to resemble the teacher’s recommendations, where his original comic satire evolves into personal obsession, perhaps more reflective of the teacher’s state of mind, but it only gets Claude deeper in trouble as he spies on Rapha’s parents having sex, among other things, developing a deep infatuation for the mother, Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), always seen flipping through various house remodeling magazines, someone he calls “the most bored housewife in the world.”

While Rapha and his Dad (also named Rapha) express themselves only through the limited vocabulary of sports analogies, showing no imagination whatsoever outside of that boy world, Esther is often left out, where Claude sees himself swooping in and rescuing her from the emptiness surrounding her.  As the story evolves, which is little more than a writer’s exercise, Germain stresses fiction while Claude insists upon realism, as only real life provides such vivid details and clarity, where each of the characters is appropriately affected by the changing events as Ozon seamlessly weaves in and out of fiction and reality until eventually one can’t tell the difference.  All of this is really just teasing one’s imagination, where the storyline balances comic absurdity with ever evolving character development, but the longer Claude ventures inside the house, voraciously accumulating pertinent details, the closer he comes to crossing the line into morally objectionable territory, as he’s continually prying into dark corners.  Germain is so reliant upon the next installment, as if his life is utterly dependent upon it, that he also ventures into questionable human behavior in his attempts to do anything in order to keep the stories coming.  Of course, this is all something of a chamber farce, like being stuck inside your head—Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) anyone?—where Claude simply can’t leave their house, or who knows what disaster might strike?  The original source material is Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s 2006 contemporary play, El Chico de la Última Fila (The Boy in the Last Row), which the director adapts for the screen.  All of the characters are interesting and well-developed, where Emmanuelle Seigner recalls Margaux Hemingway, where there’s an underlying sensuousness, but it’s much more suggested (in our heads!) than real, as she is little more than a bored housewife.  The emptiness of the middle class is constantly made fun of, not only in some of the tasteless art exhibits where Jeanne attempts to drum up interest, but especially in the vacuous world of the adults which offers little of value to the next generation, instead condescendingly cramming culture down their throats like some kind of force-fed regimen, failing to inspire or generate any hint of enthusiasm for the subject matter, where a random school paper incites much more interest than anything happening in their own dreary lives.  More fun than profound, nevertheless this is something of a charming delight, beautifully scored by Philippe Rombi, which has that pulsating underlying energy of Philip Glass.