A large percentage of us spend our days in offices, so if a movie is going to spend much of its time there, it had better ring true. Lapses in accuracy about criminal underworlds might fly past us unnoticed, but lazy, fake workplace settings will take you out of the movie just as surely as a boom mike hanging in the frame or a reflection of a cameraman obviously visible in the mirror. That’s just one of the problems plaguing Love Crime, the final feature from the late French thriller director Alain Corneau.
Kristen Scott Thomas plays Christine, an executive at the Paris office of a U.S. multinational corporation that appears to be involved in agribusiness in some way; their exact focus is ill-defined. Ludivine Sagnier is Isabelle, a lower-ranking colleague who, as the film begins, is helping Christine finish up the details of a big deal that’s about to be negotiated in Cairo. This first scene sets up the odd relationship between the two right from the start: Isabelle is driven and ambitious, determined to work her way up on the strength of hard work and ideas; Christine has already made it near the top, and sees her power as something she can use to toy with others. So she flirts with Isabelle in a manner that Human Resources surely wouldn’t approve of, and then, when her husband Philippe (Patrick Mille) walks in the door, grabs him for an ostentatious display of affection that is surely meant to mess with Isabelle’s head even more.
The two women have a close relationship, but it is tested when Christine blatantly takes credit for an idea of Isabelle’s, claiming that’s just how teamwork works. Isabelle buys this, but is also perhaps reticent to challenge her mentor given that she’s recently struck up an affair with Phillippe. There are betrayals all around, and they continue to escalate. Those betrayals are born out of both the professional and personal lives these two women, and if the professional side of that was just a minor device to get into the personal, the roughness with which they are sketched might not be such a big deal.
But through the first half-hour of the film, Corneau spends a great deal of time on the business dealings that fuel the growing resentments, without ever providing anything but the barest detail about what these people do. No one expects filmmakers to have spent much time working in offices, but the key to filmmaking is being able to create worlds that feel lived in, even if you’ve never lived in them, and at this the film fails utterly. Every scene at a desk, with a character sitting at a computer, feels so blatantly like an actor trying to create an approximation of what office work and banter feels like, that it amounts to spending the entirety of a marionette show watching the puppeteer and not the puppets.
Christine’s betrayals finally reach a tipping point for Isabelle, and at this point the film shifts out of the office (thankfully), and into a more standard procedural revenge thriller, as Isabelle meticulously sets up her plan to get back at her boss. There is some fascination to be found here, as we watch this Rube Goldberg device of a plot come together without knowing quite what it’s going to look like when Isabelle’s machinations are complete. When the moment of vengeance does come, it doesn’t happen at all as one might expect, so much so that, for a few minutes at least, it’s even possible to become completely wrapped up in why Isabelle’s plan and its aftermath are being carried out the way that they are. But even that doesn’t last particularly long, and once her true intentions become apparent, the last third of the film is mostly just a long wait for things to play out the way they need to.
Thomas and Sagnier do the best they can with what they’re given. Thomas underplays the cold calculation of Christine with an air of Gallic disinterest, while Sagnier plays Isabelle as a confused, and then wounded, puppy before turning predatory herself. But the calculations of the characters creeps into the film itself in ways that just don’t satisfy, just as the contrived business dealings never find anywhere to go below the surface. For a film about crimes of passion, the whole exercise is frustratingly lifeless.
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Love Crime
Directed by Alain Corneau
Written by Alain Corneau and Nathalie Carter
Starring Ludivine Sagnier, Kristen Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillaume Marquet
Running time: 104 minutes
Not rated.
Opens today at E Street Cinema.
