Tonally disjointed murder-mystery comedy.
It starts with an actor keeling over on stage, whispering into the ear of his friend, “I’ve been murdered . . . the green perfume”. Classic Agatha Christie shit. Good setup, I was eager to see where it went.
But it then becomes overly complicated when the main character is then bundled off by a mysterious figure and given a long speech about political consciousness in the younger generation, a scene which plays as irritating and tedious for the audience as for the story’s hero. And this kinda kicks off the film’s problems. Because the mystery part of the plot is needlessly overly-complicated, bringing in espionage and corruption and ludicrous cybersecurity McGuffins. So much so my attention just dropped off it entirely. It’s not hard to follow, just boring and irrelevant, needlessly wordy for something that doesn’t touch on any of the characters beyond a reason for them to get to a place or grab a thing.
With the mystery part being such a bloated drag on the film, the light-hearted comedic scenes are thrown off-kilter. There should be a bit of silliness and laughs to balance out the drama, and you can see what they were going for, but with the dramatic exposition so stodgy, the comedy feels out of place, too whimsical after you’ve been flattened by an anvil-drop of infodump.
Weirdly the thing that works the best is the chemistry between the two main characters. It really is the movie’s saving grace. Vincent Lacoste plays the normally cool and collected, charming young 20-something actor. Sandrine Kiberlain plays the drama junkie cartoonist that he stumbles across, who helps him solve the first piece of the puzzle, only to become addicted to seeing how it all plays out. She is a woman who has red flags written all over her, first seen arguing on the phone about a decade-long family feud she is insistent on prolonging, and then becoming entranced when a stranger tells her he is being framed for murder. The actor falls for her, both as the saviour who comes to his rescue, and because her constant exuberance seems totally at odds with his muted and a touch melancholy character. It’s an unlikely pairing, and yet is the most believable thing about the film. The best scene in the whole movie is the one where the two of them are alone, making pasta for dinner together.
And that’s my whole thing about the film, that scene, the pasta scene, isn’t like a murder-mystery comedy at all. It’s like a character-centred drama, something small-scale and domestic. And it’s wedged into the rest of this film, like pushing a fine brooch onto a lopsided jean jacket. The shifts in tone from scene to scene are all over the place.
I have to say, I did find myself liking the film more as it went on, with the developing on-screen chemistry compensating for the frankly boring plot. But it is too much of a mess to really recommend seeing.