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Title: Mon Roi Director: Maïwenn Starring: Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Bercot, Louis Garrel, Isild Le Besco, Chrystèle Saint Louis Augustin, Patrick Raynal, Paul Hamy, Yann Goven, Djemel Barek, Marie Guillard, Camille Cottin, Slim El Hedli, Norman Thavaud,Ludovic Berthillot, Félix Bousset. ‘Mon Roi’ gathers the Sturm und Drang of every individual’s struggle in letting go of someone who is simultaneously toxic and pivotal in our lives. For more than 10 years, Tony (Emmanuelle Bercot) has suffered in her love for Georgio (Vincent Cassel), trying to change him, to tame a man who’s very wildness attracted her in the first place. She even tried to suppress her own emotional needs and deal with [ Read More ]

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PARIS -- Chrysalis from debuting director Julien Leclercq is a sci-fi thriller in the tradition of Blade Runner with plenty of action, not all of it comprehensible, and impressive visuals. The plot is tortuous and larded with cliches, but there are enough compensatory pleasures for the movie to appeal to young audiences.

Chrysalis is the name given to an ingenious piece of cyber-technology in 2025 that can read a person's memories and download them onto a chip. The criminal underworld, in the shape of Bulgarian hoodlums, are determined to seize Chrysalis for their own nefarious purposes. Hard-boiled Eurocop David Hoffman (Albert Dupontel), whose wife, a fellow officer, has died in a shoot-out with the Bulgarians, has been called in to sort things out. He soon finds himself pitted against the villainous Dimitri Nikolov (Alain Figlarz).

However, Leclercq withholds the crucial information about Chrysalis until we're an hour into the film. What's more, the main action is interwoven with the story of Manon (Melanie Thierry), a teenager who has been badly disfigured in a car crash. She is undergoing surgery at a clinic run by her mother, Professor Brugen (Marthe Keller), all of which makes the early sequences difficult to decipher.

The trail leads Hoffman and his able sidekick Marie Becker (Marie Guillard) to the clinic where it turns out that Professor Burgen is a ruthless operator who has a stake in the memory game, too. She also appears to be involved in Nikolov's human trafficking scam. After the showdown with Nikolov -- the second of two brilliantly orchestrated hand-to-hand fight scenes -- Hoffman is able to stride off into the sunset.

Except there is no sunset because in Leclercq's vision, Paris -- the City of Light -- has become a grim, gray dystopia where the sun rarely shines. Filming in near-monochrome -- blue, with the palest of flesh tints -- the director creates a claustrophobic world in which technology has suppressed feeling. Jean-Philippe Moreaux's sets and Thomas Hardmeier's cinematography are superb. Moreaux in particular has taken great pains to imagine what the world of tomorrow might look like, and his research into hyper-communication mechanisms, home automation and intelligent-space technology has paid off handsomely onscreen.

Movie buffs will enjoy picking out references to (or borrowings from) other movies -- A Clockwork Orange, Minority Report and Matrix are in the mix -- and the mother-and-daughter surgical subplot forms an intended tribute to Georges Franju's 1960 horror classic Eyes Without a Face.

Dupontel is watchable as the cold-eyed action hero who only at the end allows himself a wan smile. The stylized fight scenes blocked out by Figlarz -- who also worked on The Bourne Identity -- are terrific.

CHRYSALIS

Gaumont

Credits:

Director: Julien Leclercq

Screenwriters: Julien Leclercq, Franck Philippon

Producer: Franck Chorot

Executive producer: Jean-Philippe Blime

Director of photography: Thomas Hardmeier

Production designer: Jean-Philippe Moreaux

Music: Jean-Jacques Hertz, Francois Roy

Costume designer: Fabienne Katany

Editor: Thierry Hoss

Cast:

Hoffman: Albert Dupontel

Marie: Marie Guillard

Professor Brugen: Marthe Keller

Manon Brugen: Melanie Thierry

Clara: Estelle Lefebure

Dimitri Nikolov: Alain Figlarz

Miller Claude Perron

Running time -- 91 minutes

No MPAA rating...

• Today’s Tiff Vanguard section add-ons are primarily comprised of Cannes selections, directorial debuts (girls watch out for a certain Mexican actor turned director) and international fair that defy easy categorization and have reaped some awards along the way. Also added to the Midnight Madness section are the highly awaited films from Dario Argento and Takashi Miike – both titles will be high up on the Ioncinema coverage list. Here are the added titles along with descriptions. Vanguard Titlesparanoid Park Gus Van Sant, FranceAlex (Gabe Nevins), a teenaged skateboarder, is at the centre of a criminal investigation after a security guard is killed near a skate park. Through non-linear fragments of action, voiced memories, skating scenes and Alex's inner conflict, his connection to the case is made clear. Like Van Sant's recent trilogy (Gerry, Elephant and Last Days) the sophisticated Paranoid Park, based on the novel by Blake Nelson, is

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