6 out of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Anna M
SAI81 from from Tonbridge,
4th May, 2008
After a failed suicide attempt Anna (Carre) is treated for the injuries she sustained to her leg by a handsome young doctor (Melki) on whom she develops a crush. A crush that soon becomes a consuming obsession. Isabelle Carre is the heart and soul of Michel Spinosa’s Hitchcockian exploration of erotomania. In one of the best performances of the year she seizes your attention from the word go and her rich, layered, detailed performance lifts what would otherwise be a very ordinary movie. As Anna she’s got a difficult task, playing a deeply unsympathetic, unhinged character, through whose eyes almost the entire film is told. Carre proves more than equal to the task; scary as Anna can be Carre makes her easy to empathise with, easy to care about, but without ever feeling like she’s playing for audience sympathy. It’s as strong a performance of mental illness as I can remember seeing. The actress’ dedication is evident in some of the more extreme moments, most notably a horrific, and very painful looking, moment where she smashes her head into a lamppost with great force, repeatedly. In an extraordinary year of female performances this one should earn special notice. Spinosa apparently did a lot of research into erotomania for his screenplay and while it’s nice that he put the effort in I’m not sure how much it really adds to the film as he doesn’t really break much new ground with what Anna does, however it has clearly helped in making Anna and Carre’s performance gain an air of reality. Unfortunately Spinosa seems to have focused so entirely on Anna that the rest of the characters are rather bland. Gilbert Melki and Anne Consigny aren’t bad as the couple terrorised by Anna’s obsession, but the writing of them is pretty colourless and they have little to work with. The same is true of Genevieve Mnich as Anna’s mother and Gaelle Bona as her friend from work. However the bulk of the film focuses tightly on Anna and for that time, powered by Carre, it moves along at a good pace and is absolutely involving, because it is impossible not to get wrapped up in the central performance. Sadly the film does run out of steam, it goes on about 15 minutes longer than it ought to, indeed it seems to end once (on a brilliant note) before those 15 minutes start. Without Isabelle Carre this would be an adequate distraction, with her it becomes a showcase for a tour de force performance and a much more involving film than it otherwise would be.
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