by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

Sometimes films made in the style of a cinematic auteur can be playful or campy or at least well-executed, even if the copying is done unselfconsciously. The entire suspense-thriller genre, for example, owes an obvious debt of gratitude to Hitchcock, and there are individual thrillers that employ elements of his style to great success. Though attempting just that, Secret de banlieue is not one of those films.

All the old chestnuts are present however, and what really shocked me was what little effect any of them had. We see cracked mirrors and the rotating blades of a ceiling fan. We have extreme angled shots, from various perspectives. We have a villain in latex gloves (he’s a dentist, no less) dressed in dark colours, and attempts at psycho-sexual tension between him and our pubescent heroine. We even get a thunderstorm at the narrative climax of the film. What we don’t get is a thrill.

Secret de banlieue is narrated by the young heroine, Catherine (Roxane Gaudette-Loiseau), a cocky 12 year old, in the strongest performance of the film. (She plays “annoying” dead-on.) She lives alone with her mother, smart-alecking her way towards adolescence until new neighbours arrive, the handsome David and his sheltered but sweet 12-year-old daughter Ariane. The two girls strike up a friendship, but the secret David harbours bodes ill for them both, as well as Catherine’s amorous single mother Maryse (well played by Élise Guilbault). Tensions soon grow between the ’burb’s residents, with alleged suspense leading up to a climactic boil in a secluded forest on a rainy night.

I get the secret bit—what about the suburb in the title? Despite the connotation of strict control and a suffocatingly middle-class sensibility, all the suburban locations mean here are interiors straight from a Sears catalogue, streets lined with appalling monster homes, and an ’80s news anchor haircut for David.

Clearly, we’re all better off downtown. :

Secret de banlieue opens Friday, Oct. 4

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