Francois Ozon’s farce looks back to screw-ball comedies of the 1930s, and forward to the Me-Too Movement.

Francois Ozon’s farce looks back to screw-ball comedies of the 1930s, and forward to the Me-Too Movement.

Joyce Glasser reviews The Crime is Mine (October 18, 2024), cert 15, 102 mins.

Like Wes Anderson, but even more prolific, varied and consistently good, French writer-director François Ozon attracts top actors like a magnate. The Crime is Mine is filled with a superlative cast of well-drawn characters who support the two stars, who, as is often the case with Ozon, are female.

It’s a mark of the director’s diversity that this 1930’s farce, an homage to the American screwball comedies of that era, is being released in the same week that his sombre contemporary family drama, When Autumn is Coming, is being shown at the London Film Festival.

That’s not to say The Crime is Mine is not relevant. On the contrary, if it weren’t set in the 1930s you might think Ozon was commenting on the sexist film industry that gave rise to the Me-Too Movement. Perish the thought.

It might be a cliché, but blond, ditzy, red-lipped Madeleine (Nadia Terezkiewicz, Rosalie) is a struggling actress, living in a cramped flat with her best friend, the self-conscious brunette and unemployed lawyer, Pauline (Rebecca Marder). They are five months behind on the rent and Pauline cannot charm the landlord much longer.

Pauline points out that at least Madeleine has a boyfriend André Bonnard (Édouard Sulpice), although his marriage proposal has not been forthcoming. Pauline, who has an inferiority complex, is unattached, her romantic leanings kept under wraps.

So everything depends on Madeline’s audition for a reputedly lecherous but prominent producer named Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet). The film begins with a dishevelled woman – Madeleine – running from Montferrand’s home.

Distraught, she tells Pauline that he offered her a smaller part in exchange for being his mistress, which she refused. Shortly thereafter, Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalès) investigates and charges Madeleine with murder.

In one of the funniest scenes in a film packed with them, the prosecuting judge Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini, from Ozon’s In the House) and Brun cook up a case based on circumstantial evidence. The perceptive but ignored clerk Léon Trapu (Olivier Broche) tries in vain to point out errors in the reasoning, if not with the law.

Madeleine’s spoilt, childish boyfriend, André, heir to Bonnet Tyres, owned by his father (André Dussollier, wonderful), is not the knight in shining armour Madeleine needs. Workshy, and certain to be disinherited if he doesn’t marry a wealthy society girl, André informs Madeleine of his brilliant idea: he will marry into money to please his father but will lavish it on Madeleine as his mistress. Madeleine, dismayed, faces a bleak future with only Pauline at her side.

There is one other suspect: a man who would gain financially from the murder. The sophisticated, debonair architect Fernand Palmarède (Dany Boon) has an alibi, however: he was having lunch with Rabusset at the time of the murder, an occasion Rabusset has somehow overlooked or forgotten.

Madeleine, who tells Rabusset that Montferrand attempted to rape her, pleads guilty to the lesser count of self-defence. With Pauline as her defence attorney, Madeleine becomes a cause célèbre.

Isabelle Huppert, hamming it up to the hilt, might enter the cast relatively late, but her character, an exaggerated nod to Sarah Bernhardt, throws a spanner in the works.

Ozon cannot take full credit for all the twists and turns in this mad-cap plot, which is loosely adapted from the 1934 play My Crime by Georges Berr and Louis VerneuiI (who was married to the granddaughter of Sarah Bernhardt). But as we saw with Ozon’s superb Everything Went Fine, he’s a master of cinematic screen adaptations.

The 28-year-old actress Nadia Terezkiewicz was perfect casting for the eponymous bearded pub wife in Rosalie, and superb in Robin Campillo’s family drama Red Island, but here she is the weakest link. Either her comic timing is off, or it’s the challenge of a character who has to play it fairly straight in a farce.

While the rest of the cast approach perfection, Dany Boon (the troubled taxi driver in last year’s comedy-drama Driving Madeleine) as the surprise hero, Palmarède; Fabrice Luchini, lampooning pompous prosecutors; and the scene-stealing Olivier Broche as the hilarious Trapu, are the stand-outs.