Film review: 'Criminal Lovers'
Francois Ozon upholds his reputation as one of France's most provocative new filmmakers with "Criminal Lovers", a voyeuristic, noir fairy tale of a thriller.
A prize winner at the recent Outfest 2000, which also screened the prolific Ozon's upcoming "Water Drops on Burning Rocks", the creepy if uneven picture should still do well by its niche audience.
Natacha Regnier, who took home a slew of acting awards for her performance in "The Dreamlife of Angels", is the coldly manipulative Alice, a jaded teen who successfully persuades her naive, sexually uncertain boyfriend Luc (Jeremie Renier) to help murder the swaggering Said Salim Kechiouche) for reasons that aren't made clear until much later in the film.
For the time being, we're expected to just go with the program as this supposedly amoral twosome also finds time to hold up a jewelry store before turning to the business of disposing of a freshly killed body.
They find an ideal place deep in the woods, but once they complete the burial, they discover they are hopelessly lost. Hungry and tired, Luc and Alice stumble upon a hidden cabin occupied by a hermit (Miki Manojlovic). He doesn't take too kindly to trespassers who also happen to be murderers.
Forced into a rat-infested cellar until their fate may be decided by the woodsman, Luc and Alice occupy their time by flashing back to the events leading up to their crime until their grizzled host reveals his decidedly unpredictable intentions.
It's certainly hard not to be provocative with a film that manages to conjure the likes of "Natural Born Killers", "The Blair Witch Project" and "Hansel and Gretel", with homoerotic overtones. And if it would seem like that grouping might make for very strange bedfellows, the truth is that those thematic elements don't always add up to a satisfyingly integrated mix.
But Ozon manages to keep it all quite intriguing, constantly peeling back the layers of an enigmatic narrative that at times treads a very fine line between sensationalism and camp.
While the two young leads are fairly limited by their one-
dimensional characters, Manojlovic, a favorite of directors Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljevic, delivers an ideally weighted performance as the scary but oddly sympathetic hunter. He's an alternative-lifestyle fantasy take on a familiar Brothers Grimm archetype.
Also creating an effectively unsettling vibe is director of photography Pierre Stoeber, whose restless, often hand-held cinematography is accompanied by Philippe Rombi's similarly anxious score.
CRIMINAL LOVERS
Strand Releasing
Fidelite Prods., Studio Canal Plus,
La Sept/ARTE Euro Space (Japan)
with the participation of Canal Plus
and support from CNC (France)
Producers: Marc Missonnier, Olivier Delbosc
Director-screenwriter: Francois Ozon
Director of photography: Pierre Stoeber
Production designer: Arnaud de Moleron
Editor: Dominique Petrot
Costume designer: Pascaline Chavanne
Music: Philippe Rombi
Color/stereo
Cast
Alice: Natacha Regnier
Luc: Jeremie Renier
Woodsman: Miki Manojlovic
Said: Salim Kechiouche
Karim: Yasmine Belmadi
Running time - 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
A prize winner at the recent Outfest 2000, which also screened the prolific Ozon's upcoming "Water Drops on Burning Rocks", the creepy if uneven picture should still do well by its niche audience.
Natacha Regnier, who took home a slew of acting awards for her performance in "The Dreamlife of Angels", is the coldly manipulative Alice, a jaded teen who successfully persuades her naive, sexually uncertain boyfriend Luc (Jeremie Renier) to help murder the swaggering Said Salim Kechiouche) for reasons that aren't made clear until much later in the film.
For the time being, we're expected to just go with the program as this supposedly amoral twosome also finds time to hold up a jewelry store before turning to the business of disposing of a freshly killed body.
They find an ideal place deep in the woods, but once they complete the burial, they discover they are hopelessly lost. Hungry and tired, Luc and Alice stumble upon a hidden cabin occupied by a hermit (Miki Manojlovic). He doesn't take too kindly to trespassers who also happen to be murderers.
Forced into a rat-infested cellar until their fate may be decided by the woodsman, Luc and Alice occupy their time by flashing back to the events leading up to their crime until their grizzled host reveals his decidedly unpredictable intentions.
It's certainly hard not to be provocative with a film that manages to conjure the likes of "Natural Born Killers", "The Blair Witch Project" and "Hansel and Gretel", with homoerotic overtones. And if it would seem like that grouping might make for very strange bedfellows, the truth is that those thematic elements don't always add up to a satisfyingly integrated mix.
But Ozon manages to keep it all quite intriguing, constantly peeling back the layers of an enigmatic narrative that at times treads a very fine line between sensationalism and camp.
While the two young leads are fairly limited by their one-
dimensional characters, Manojlovic, a favorite of directors Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljevic, delivers an ideally weighted performance as the scary but oddly sympathetic hunter. He's an alternative-lifestyle fantasy take on a familiar Brothers Grimm archetype.
Also creating an effectively unsettling vibe is director of photography Pierre Stoeber, whose restless, often hand-held cinematography is accompanied by Philippe Rombi's similarly anxious score.
CRIMINAL LOVERS
Strand Releasing
Fidelite Prods., Studio Canal Plus,
La Sept/ARTE Euro Space (Japan)
with the participation of Canal Plus
and support from CNC (France)
Producers: Marc Missonnier, Olivier Delbosc
Director-screenwriter: Francois Ozon
Director of photography: Pierre Stoeber
Production designer: Arnaud de Moleron
Editor: Dominique Petrot
Costume designer: Pascaline Chavanne
Music: Philippe Rombi
Color/stereo
Cast
Alice: Natacha Regnier
Luc: Jeremie Renier
Woodsman: Miki Manojlovic
Said: Salim Kechiouche
Karim: Yasmine Belmadi
Running time - 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 7/26/2000
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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