Boy, oh, Baye! Nathalie is terrific in Ali & Bonilauri's French thriller, THE ASSISTANT

If you haven't yet met Nathalie Baye, here's your chance, in a new French thriller just making its VODebut entitled THE ASSISTANT (La Volante). This four-time César-winning actress is always good and usually a lot more than that. In her current movie -- directed by Christophe Ali and Nicolas Bonilauri, and co-written by the two, along with Philippe Blasband and Jacques Sotty -- she plays Marie-France, the mother of an adult son on whom befalls an accident that changes her life and, it turns out, the lives of a number of others some years after.

The movie begins with both death and birth via a sudden shocking situation that no one would ever want to endure. We catch our first sight of Ms Baye in the scene just after, and the manner in which her character handles her grief is so awful and intense that this enables us to accept and believe what follows. And what follows is, as they say, something else.

The filmmakers Ali and Bonilauri (shown above, with Ali on the left) intend their film to be first and foremost a thriller, and they succeed in this regard quite well. Ms Baye, being the fine actress she is, intends to give us character above all else, and this combo of character and thrills make the movie a cut or two above the usual for this genre. This is the duo's third full-length film, though TrustMovies has only previously caught their second one -- a bizarre little character study/thriller released to DVD stateside as Wild Camp starring two indelible French actors Isild Le Besco (A tout de suite) and Denis Lavant (Beau Travail).

In The Assistant, the filmmakers begin with a whoppingly intense few minutes, after which they quickly cut to a few years later. It is here than the "revenge" would seem to start (though the plans for it have clearly been laid for some time previous). Or is this wholly about revenge? Perhaps, we wonder, it might be something more. The directors and their fine cast keep us ever alert and guessing, with Ms Baye in particularly good form as an obsessed woman whose many talents -- if used toward other ends -- could probably have made her President of France.

Baye's Marie-France is a force to be reckoned with, all right, and if the filmmakers use a good deal of shorthand in piecing together their fraught tale, they give us enough info to follow along without keeping too far ahead of the game. There are a couple of moments when we might not quite buy what is happening (how come the young boy is so suddenly disenchanted with his teacher/grandma/mother surrogate?), yet so fast is the pacing and propulsive the motion (the film lasts but 87 minutes), that we can't easily get off this roller coaster. Nor would we want to.

Also prominent in the fine cast are Malike Zidi (three photos above) and Sabrina Seyvecou as the hapless couple who starts the ball rolling, Johan Leysen as Zidi's all-too-trusting dad, and Jean-Stan Du Pac (above, left, and center right, two photos above) as the innocent object of revenge.

From Distrib Films US, The Assistant is heading straight for VOD, where it will make its debut on iTunes this coming Tuesday, August 23 -- for some end-of-summer fun and games -- and then hit theaters for a very limited release in late September.

Read more »

"family" films, character studies, Christophe Ali, Nathalie Baye, Nicolas Bonilauri, revenge thrillers, THE ASSISTANT, the workplace,

Rate it :

Revenge? Ridiculous. Philippe Martinez's VIKTOR stars Gérard Depardieu and Elizabeth Hurley

Elizabeth Hurley looks simply great (middle-aged, yes, but gorgeous) in Philippe Martinez's revenge-sated would-be noir, VIKTOR, which doubles as the name of the movie's main character, played by Gérard Depardieu -- who looks fat. Very fat. When the two stars make love, mid-movie, you fear for Ms Hurley's life. Since Viktor, the movie, is very much in the revenge/action genre, you may wonder, too, how M. Depardieu will handle those "action" scenes. Hint: He doesn't.

There's a car chase early on in which Depardieu is being pursued by the bad guys when, suddenly, the filmmaker (M. Martinez is shown at left) simply cuts to the next scene. Huh? He then has a character explain how he outdrove the bad guys, and then, what? Viktor got out of the car and ran so fast and quickly from the location that he was able to escape? Yeah, right.

The revenge here has to do with the death of Viktor's son, and how our "hero" gets even, taking down bad guy after bad guy until only the top baddie remains. From the outset, this movie is so entirely paint-by-numbers and the revenge so darned easy to get that the film often falls into unintentional camp. However, it is filled with swank locations -- hotel, clubs, restaurants (wealthy bad guys always frequent the best, right? -- and when Viktor goes to visit his son's grave, we even get some gorgeous countryside locations, as well.

That dead son also had a girlfriend who has a secret of her own, and soon Viktor must protect her life (while taking a bunch of others). Along the way, we get an assassination (by the hot number, below), who gets her comeuppance via the very guy who hired her to do the job.

There is also a piece of very valuable missing art that Viktor evidently stole way back when -- he's been in prison for a time, you see -- and a pretty, no-nonsense policewoman (below) on the trail of that art. (Note the nod to that puny little dictator, Putin, that portrait of whom also appears prominently in the current arthouse hit Leviathan.)

We even get some nasty torture, too, by Depardieu, below, who clearly appreciates the bullying of the leader of his chosen new country. (When French taxes proved too high for this major monied man, the actor moved to Russia, where he was given citizenship: One expert bully can always spot another, right?)

And so it goes for 97 too-long minutes. The initial movie, according to the IMDB, ran 134 minutes, so U.S. viewers should consider themselves lucky.

In any case, Viktor -- via Inception Media Group -- has now been released on DVD, VOD and even streaming from Netflix (and perhaps elsewhere, too). If this is the kind of swank and silly swill Depardieu (formerly a very fine actor) plans to churn out in Russia, he and his newly adopted country deserve each other.

Read more »

French-Russian collaborations, Philippe Martinez, revenge thrillers, swank locations, VIKTOR,

Rate it :