After adapting Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in Peter von Kant (2002), and tackling medically assisted suicides in Everything Went Fine (2021), a youthful gay romance in Summer of ‘85 (2020) and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in By the Grace of God (2018), François Ozon delivers a palette cleanser of sorts with his 22nd feature film, The Crime Is Mine. It’s a movie reminiscent of the equally prolific Pedro Almodóvar’s decision to follow his tense noir melodramas Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009) and The Skin I Live In (2011) with the frothy lark I’m So Excited (2013).
But while Almodóvar was poking some belated fun at the disaster movies of the '70s, Ozon, in adapting and slightly updating the 1934 farcical play by George Berr and Louis Verneuil, pays tribute not only to an era of classic French stage farce (think Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear) but also to the works of Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and the films of that era. The Crime Is Mine may begin with theater curtains opening and end with a final bow from two of the film’s actors at the end of a play based on the proceedings we just witnessed, but the film is not stagey. Ozon plays with form by deploying a whole set of techniques borrowed from silent movies and the screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s: scenes closing in irises, dialogue delivered at breakneck speed, and flashbacks shot in black and white and in a 4:3 aspect ratio accompanied by a voiceover. Each heightens the film’s humor and its characters’ quirkiness.
The film opens on the exterior of an elegant house; from inside we hear the sound of crashing objects. A woman hurriedly leaves the premises. Her name is Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereskiewicz), a failed actor who was meeting a producer who promised her a major role in his next play if she became his mistress. Madeline and her roommate, a lawyer and the equally unsuccessful Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), share a room and a bed in Paris; they owe at least three months rent and are this close to being evicted by their landlord. For Madeleine there is no more recourse to their quandary than suicide. The police soon come knocking at her door: turns out that someone shot that producer and Madeleine was the last person to see him. A gun is found in her room. For the pompous magistrate handling her case, the discovery means that he can quickly close the case, especially after Madeline falsely confesses.
The French press have a field day, especially since the trial comes right after Violette Nozière was sentenced to death for the murder of her parents in 1934 (a story Claude Chabrol brought to the big screen in his 1978 film Violette). The fame that so long eluded Madeleine and her roommate, who takes on her defense, has finally arrived. The trial sequences, with their pompous prosecutors and witnesses, the shouting crowds and acerbic dialogue, acts as a satirical riposte to the more somber trial in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Both trials are portrayed as a stage, where human nature is deployed in all its folly for all to see. Where one trial revels in ambiguity, Ozon’s ends in a feminist cry, Madeleine’s actions seen as the natural next step of women affirming themselves, of saying enough is enough even if it means bumping off a man or two…all tongue in cheek, of course.
Absolved from the crime, both friends revel in their success until silent film star Odette Chaumette enters the stage. More I will not say for I enter into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that Odette is played by Isabelle Huppert in full grand dame mode and she is a blast (Huppert played Violette in Chabrol’s film so her casting is definitely not a coincidence). That final act is as full of delightful twists and turns and riproaring dialogue as the film’s first two acts. Ozon ramps up the plot’s ludicrousness, coming up with a solution to our heroines’ travails that feels right out of Wodehouse’s novels and plays.
Ozon has some fun at the expense of his male characters. Not a single one of them is redeemable. As played by Édouard Sulpice, André, Madeleine’s boyfriend, is the prototypical good-for-nothing son of the aristocracy, deeply in love, whose genius for concocting ridiculous, and rather insulting, plans to bypass his father’s objections to his love affair make Bernie Wooster look like a master conniver. And those who are supposed to uphold the law, from Magistrate Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini) to the misogynistic prosecutor (Michael Fau), are portrayed as clueless bureaucrats. The entire male case is game, turning these broad caricatures into an idiot’s delight.
The women, on the other hand, are astute; they quickly learn how to game a system that is stacked against them. One of the film’s many joys is to see how our female trio gets the upper hand on the bumbling opposite sex. Like Almodóvar, Ozon possesses an empathetic understanding of women.
The theatrical release of The Crime Is Mine comes at the end of an extraordinary year in cinema. 2023’s harvest was bountiful, the cinematic meals scrumptious and heavy. Most of them, in one way or another, spoke to the dark times ahead of us. Yes, there were comedies, but none with the wit and sense of sheer joy as this one. So consider Ozon’s new film a delightfully sweet dessert, a divertimento, a happy way to end the year as we prepare for what 2024 will bring us.
The Crime Is Mine opens Monday, December 25 at the Music Box Theatre.
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