Wife sentence

French jailbreak thriller Pour elle is
predictable and hard to swallow

PRISON PROBLEMS: Diane Kruger

by MALCOLM FRASER

French writer-director Fred Cavayé’s latest, Pour elle, is a thriller that somehow manages to be both predictable and peculiar. Multilingual actress Diane Kruger, who balances French fare with such cinematic gems as Troy and the National Treasure films, plays Lisa, a blissfully married mom who’s unjustly accused of murdering her boss and sentenced to life in prison. Vincent Lindon (familiar from recent French fluff such as Je crois que je l’aime and Mes amis, mes amours) is her husband Julien, a mild-mannered teacher whose manners become decidedly less mild as his wife’s sentence drags on. Unable to successfully appeal her case, he gets to work on a scheme to break her out of the clink, all the while struggling to raise their young son.

The central problem with the film is that it’s just not very believable. Not only in the particulars of Lindon’s plan, which tend to lean heavily on convenient coincidences—a van full of important documents whose driver regularly leaves it unlocked, a series of security guards who flout the rules to let Lindon past them apparently out of sympathy—but even in the initial setup. We encounter the couple in the throes of a passionate date night, after which they return to their infant son. Maybe it’s just me, but the new parents I know tend to be not so frisky and fabulous, more like perpetually tired and harried. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect realism, but this idealized portrait makes it hard to buy the characters as people.

Though Kruger (soon to be seen in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) and Lindon give solid performances complete with some heavy emotional breakdowns, and Cavayé proves himself competent in the basics of manipulative suspense, the whole thing just unfolds too neatly, with the few surprises coming across as difficult-to-swallow detours or pointless digressions. There have been some pretty great thrillers out of France lately, from the action-packed Ne le dis à personne to the dramatic Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. This is not one of them. But don’t take it from me, as it seems to have impressed someone—word has it that critics’ darling Paul Haggis is slated to remake Pour elle in Hollywood.

POUR ELLE OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JUNE 12