Movie review: 'Tell No One'

French twist on twisted American themes

By Michael Phillips

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Marie-Josée Croze and François Cluzet in "Tell No One" (Credit: Music Box)

3 stars (out of four)

Enough talk; enough flashbacks. Sometimes the best thing a mystery can do is give its protagonist a reason to run like hell.

The example of the year arrives midway through the French thriller “Tell No One.” A pediatrician wrongly accused of murder is being chased by the police. The doctor zigzags across the Paris beltway, narrowly avoiding traffic. The way the sequence is shot and edited, you believe every second; it unfolds, nervously, the way something like this would actually happen. It’s on the money, this brief, memorable scene: tense and sharp but not overblown.

These qualities apply to the acting as well. Under the direction of Guillaume Canet, who adapted Harlan Coben’s English-language best  seller with Philippe Lefebvre, this is a splendid ensemble doing its level best to keep the audience guessing all the way through an increasingly knotty narrative. Francois Cluzet, who resembles an elongated Dustin Hoffman, plays the doctor, and the performance is a marvel of containment. He reveals a great deal non-verbally. The man’s grief and cunning come through subtly in each new chapter.

Coben’s story owes debts to Alfred Hitchcock’s wrong-man scenarios, “The Fugitive” and the morally grimy landscape of novelist Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”). The milieu is as American as apple pie and serial killers. Yet its Gallic transformation works. The story hook remains the same, and it’s pretty irresistible. Eight years after the vicious murder of his wife, whom he had known since they were childhood sweethearts, Dr. Beck receives an e-mail containing a surveillance video of a woman who may be the woman in question, mysteriously alive. She’s played by the superb French-Canadian actress Marie-Josee Croze, last seen as the speech therapist in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

The cryptic e-mail instructs the doctor to keep mum  and wait for another message. The police, meantime, have circumstantial evidence implicating the doctor in another murder. The events of the fateful night eight years ago haunt the doctor because they do not add up, and a daisy chain of secrets links that murky past to the increasingly bloody present.

“Tell No One” came out in France in 2006 to enormous success. Subsequently Chicago’s own Music Box Films took a chance on the picture, its third release, following the excellent “Tuya’s Marriage” and the more recent “OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies.” The gamble is paying off, with impressive box office tallies for “Tell No One” in New York and Los Angeles. The film is opening up into a wider American release this week. It’s worth seeing.

The recommendation comes with a caveat. When the resolution arrives, it arrives like a particularly crowded game of Twister. As the truth of the wife’s disappearance emerges, flashback wrestles with flashback, and those of us who tend to get lost in these sorts of explanatory pile-ups, even if the character explaining it all to us is brandishing a loaded gun, may feel that they’ll never get out of “Tell No One” alive.

The actors come to the rescue. Cluzet’s watchful intensity holds you throughout. Andre Dussollier portrays the policeman father of the doctor’s wife, and it’s fascinating to see such a naturally ebullient actor (he sparkled in Alain Resnais’ “Private Fears in Public Places”) trade it all in for a gruff, stern glower. Everyone’s ideally cast: Kristin Scott-Thomas as a lesbian restaurateur; Nathalie Baye as an icy whirlwind of an attorney; and director Canet as the son of a wealthy power broker played by the elegantly sinister Jean Rochefort .
As in the world of  Lehane,   the circles of corruption widen outward, until those swimming in it can barely see the shore. What I like about this picture—a French policier  dropped inside Hollywood pulp fiction—has less to do with its grandiose, dirty-town vision of the evil that men do. I like the opportunities it affords its actors, who elevate every little insinuation and double-cross to a higher level.

mjphillips@tribune.com.