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HANGING
OFFENSE
6/10
Cette
femme-la : France 2003 : Guillaume NICLOUX : 100
mins
 Hanging
Offense is a classy modern policier - though on reflection,
policiere might be a more suitable term, as le flic in question
is Michele Varin (Josiane Balasko), a fiftyish female police-captain based
in the outskirts of Paris. Her latest case involves a woman whose body
is found hanging in the woods. Suicide? Varin reckons not - but soon gets
much more than she'd bargained for.
The convoluted
plot takes some following, but the film works consistently well
as a character-study of Varin - presumably "that woman" referred
to in the original Francophone title. A tragedy-haunted, jigsaw-addicted
insomniac so tired that she lapses into brief moments of nightmarish sleep
both day and night, Varin is plagued and annoyed by these terrifying mini-cauchemars.
We rapidly sympathise, so frequently does writer-director Nicloux deploy
this rather cheap cinematic trick.
There's no
denying that these sequences manage to both jangle our nerves and take
us right into Varin's troubled head - but at a significant price. Because
we're never able to trust what we're seeing, the film only haltingly builds
suspense. And the slight artsiness of the approach (most notably - recurrent
shots of an oh-so-significant back alley) isn't a great fit for thrillerish
material, despite there being much to like about cinematographer Jean-Claude
Lother's prowling camerawork and his nocturnal, forestscape compositions.
The real trump-card,
however, is veteran Balasko, who anchors the picture in believable reality
- Nicloux sensibly keeps her on-camera almost throughout, in stark contrast
to fleeting (but effective) appearances from established French 'names'
Aurelien Recoing and Thierry Lhermitte. The latter's heavily-bandaged
cameo is a wry in-joke, Lhermitte having played the private-eye lead in
Nicloux's previous picture A
Private Affair - an intriguing drama let down by its gimmicky
twist climax. With Hanging Offense, Nicloux wisely opts for a conventional,
all-action denouement, this time wrapping things up on a much more
satisfying note.
14th September,
2004
(seen 25th August : Cameo Edinburgh : press show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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