Film Review: Passions lurk beneath icy exteriors in 'Crime'

Pascal Chantier

Switching between English and French, Kristin Scott Thomas plays a charming yet cruel senior executive in the Alain Corneau suspense thriller "Love Crime."

Kristin Scott Thomas is a manipulative and sadistic queen bee while Ludivine Sagnier is a bespectacled worker bee who develops a sting of her own in "Love Crime," a spare and sleek French suspense film that is the posthumously released final feature from director Alain Corneau, who succumbed to cancer on Aug. 30, 2010, at age 67.

I borrow the apian metaphor from a character in the film, Philippe (Patrick Mille), who refers to the two women as "busy little bees." They both work in the steel-and-glass high-finance hive of an international business high-rise, but Christine (Thomas) is a lavishly rewarded senior executive while Isabelle (Sagnier, the knockout from 2003's "Swimming Pool") is the attractive but seemingly insecure corporate drone who does the real work, only to see her boss take the credit. "It's not betrayal," Christine says. "It's teamwork."

Love Crime (Crime d'amour)

Isabelle works under Christine at the French subsidiary of a large US multinational. While both women appear to be similar and compatible, they are very ...

Rating: No Rating

Length: 106 minutes

Released: September 2, 2011 NY

Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Ludivine Sagnier, Mike Powers, Patrick Mille, Gérald Laroche

Director: Alain Corneau

Writer: Alain Corneau, Nathalie Carter

More info and showtimes »

Influenced by the brainy and ruthless crime novels of Patricia Highsmith, but with the ultimately pat ironies of a 1990s thriller from Roger Corman's Concorde-New Horizons company, "Love Crime" is engrossing for about half its length, thanks especially to the icy Thomas, who switches back and forth between seductive charm and cold-blooded psychological cruelty, and between English and apparently flawless French (as she did in the recent "Sarah's Key"). The movie is less novel as well as less plausible during its second half, which jettisons the "All About Eve" influence to chronicle the planning and aftermath of a perhaps brilliant crime, but substitutes cliché black-and-white flashbacks (unattractive, because the color appears to have been digitally removed) for the elegant compositions and stunning décor of the first part of the movie. (Christine's spacious den includes a coffee table the size of Montana, and sofas like cruise ships.)

Produced from an original if derivative script by Corneau and Nathalie Carter, "Love Crime" should appeal especially to fans of the long tradition of American-influenced French crime films by such directors as Truffaut, René Clément, Claude Chabrol and Corneau, a specialist in the genre, whose previous features include "La Menace" and "Série Noire" (based on a novel by Jim Thompson). Like the latter film, "Love Crime" should have retained its original title for its American release: "Crime d'Amour" is not just more attractively French (duh), but more evocative of the way the movie connects erotic and abusive power. Corneau's matter-of-fact presentation of the movie's very brief moments of sex and violence reinforces the idea of this connection: It suggests that dangerous passions lurk beneath the calm exteriors and neat pantsuits of apparently respectable men and women. As a police inspector observes: "Human beings are so complicated."

The sparsely used free-jazz score is by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.

"Love Crime" is exclusively at Malco's Studio on the Square.

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