Cast: Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger, Lancelot Roch, Olivier Marchal
‘Anything For Her’ is the first major international outing for French director Fred Cavaye, but with a little help from lead actress Diane Kruger the film was deemed suitable for an audience outside France and so we in Blighty have been treated to a brief run at Curzon cinemas.
I cannot claim to have an enormously wide-ranging knowledge of French films, but most of the fare that has travelled across the channel from the home of cinema and fallen upon my humble optic nerve has been in the Michael Haneke vein of fractured narratives or the Christophe Honore mould of languid emotional tales.
‘Anything For Her’ certainly doesn’t fit into either of these categories. It is a dark, gritty, noirish story about a husband desperately trying to free his innocent wife from jail. An academic somewhere in the dusty corners of Birkbeck College is probably trying to find proof that the film is really a comment on the nature of cinema and perspective; but in my opinion it is really just a hard-hitting – dare I say it even populist – thriller with an engaging performance from Vincent Lindon as the grief-stricken husband, Julien.
The film follows Julien from his last, passionate evening with wife Lisa (Kruger) before she is abruptly and violently wrested from his grasp by a group of faceless policemen. Time passes and we find Julien awaiting the results of the final appeal. The appeal fails and Julien is left in despairing grief, trying to continue his life as a teacher and single parent to their toddler son.
The film could have been a ‘Winslow Boy’-esque examination of a family’s ruinous attempts to defend the honour of a family member whose innocence is suspect. But I am not giving too much away when I tell you that Lisa is certainly innocent. Nor does the film waste any time on court cases and the mundane trials of bureaucracy, covering the entire appeal in a series of reactions to unheard phone calls with lawyers. The film wastes no time reaching the thrilling, gritty heart of the story… Julien’s decision to mastermind a jailbreak for his innocent wife.
To continue narrating the film’s unfolding story would be to treat it like an academic product rather than the entertaining thriller that it is. Suffice to say, Julien is dragged out of his classroom and into the gritty underworld of what I am narrow-mindedly willing to assume is Paris, but could quite frankly be any city in any French-speaking country (I am not so well travelled geographically).
The moody but evocative cinematography is perfectly in tune with the pace and tone of Cavaye’s direction, which sees slow, tense scenes of a lonely and broken Julien interspersed with action-packed, fast-paced scenes of his unfolding plans. The film is a true joy to watch; and it is only the laziness of the general cinema-going public (who are not so much ‘scared’ of foreign films as just unwilling to read the subtitles) that stops films like this achieving immediate commercial success. I only hope that the Internet and DVD sales will elevate this film to the level of ‘Tell No One’ and ‘La Haine’.
Perhaps anyone who has seen the film and is reading this article (and the cross-over demographic is probably negligible at best) will consider spreading the this film and some of my other suggestions by setting up a ‘Backyard Theatre’. My next column will be exploring the growing trend in D.I.Y cinemas in back gardens that has swept the US and is set to invade Britain this summer.
‘Anything For Her’ is the first major international outing for French director Fred Cavaye, but with a little help from lead actress Diane Kruger the film was deemed suitable for an audience outside France and so we in Blighty have been treated to a brief run at Curzon cinemas.
I cannot claim to have an enormously wide-ranging knowledge of French films, but most of the fare that has travelled across the channel from the home of cinema and fallen upon my humble optic nerve has been in the Michael Haneke vein of fractured narratives or the Christophe Honore mould of languid emotional tales.
‘Anything For Her’ certainly doesn’t fit into either of these categories. It is a dark, gritty, noirish story about a husband desperately trying to free his innocent wife from jail. An academic somewhere in the dusty corners of Birkbeck College is probably trying to find proof that the film is really a comment on the nature of cinema and perspective; but in my opinion it is really just a hard-hitting – dare I say it even populist – thriller with an engaging performance from Vincent Lindon as the grief-stricken husband, Julien.
The film follows Julien from his last, passionate evening with wife Lisa (Kruger) before she is abruptly and violently wrested from his grasp by a group of faceless policemen. Time passes and we find Julien awaiting the results of the final appeal. The appeal fails and Julien is left in despairing grief, trying to continue his life as a teacher and single parent to their toddler son.
The film could have been a ‘Winslow Boy’-esque examination of a family’s ruinous attempts to defend the honour of a family member whose innocence is suspect. But I am not giving too much away when I tell you that Lisa is certainly innocent. Nor does the film waste any time on court cases and the mundane trials of bureaucracy, covering the entire appeal in a series of reactions to unheard phone calls with lawyers. The film wastes no time reaching the thrilling, gritty heart of the story… Julien’s decision to mastermind a jailbreak for his innocent wife.
To continue narrating the film’s unfolding story would be to treat it like an academic product rather than the entertaining thriller that it is. Suffice to say, Julien is dragged out of his classroom and into the gritty underworld of what I am narrow-mindedly willing to assume is Paris, but could quite frankly be any city in any French-speaking country (I am not so well travelled geographically).
The moody but evocative cinematography is perfectly in tune with the pace and tone of Cavaye’s direction, which sees slow, tense scenes of a lonely and broken Julien interspersed with action-packed, fast-paced scenes of his unfolding plans. The film is a true joy to watch; and it is only the laziness of the general cinema-going public (who are not so much ‘scared’ of foreign films as just unwilling to read the subtitles) that stops films like this achieving immediate commercial success. I only hope that the Internet and DVD sales will elevate this film to the level of ‘Tell No One’ and ‘La Haine’.
Perhaps anyone who has seen the film and is reading this article (and the cross-over demographic is probably negligible at best) will consider spreading the this film and some of my other suggestions by setting up a ‘Backyard Theatre’. My next column will be exploring the growing trend in D.I.Y cinemas in back gardens that has swept the US and is set to invade Britain this summer.
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