Harry meint es gut mit dir

The debut of french director Dominik Moll is a brilliant movie that follows Hitchcock's school of classic suspense to the letter, while keeping the directors own modern style in a psychological thriller reminiscent of David Lynch.

Laurent Lucas stars as Michel, father of a middle-class family that goes on vacation to their house in rural France. On a gas station he finds Harry (played by Sergi López), a rich man who went to high school with Michel and that is traveling towards Switzerland with his girlfriend Prune (beautiful Sophie Guillemin). Michel invites Harry to his house, because even when he can't remember who Harry is, it seems as if Harry remembers everything about Michel.

The problems of Michel with his parents and his wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner) will come to light as Harry intrusion becomes more apparent and Claire begins to wonder how healthy is Harry's influence over his husband.

The story moves at a slow pace building the suspense and the tension between the characters to a maximum. Nevertheless, the direction and the script make sure that this slow rhythm will not become boring or tiresome and the movie works very wheel filled with interesting scenes that give everything you NEED to know about the characters, but not everything you WANT to know about them.

This classic take on suspense and mystery, that many have tried with mixed results, works very good here thanks to the wonderful script that adds scenes of bizarre surrealism that while serve the purpose of breaking the suspense, they also increase the tension and mystery surrounding their characters.

It's worthy to mention the superb acting of those involved. Lucas, Seigner and López have a good chemistry on screen that clearly helps the movie to be as powerful as it is.

By the end of the movie the tension is at it's peak and the script makes the most of it giving a brilliant finale that even when it is very simple it is both mysterious and rewarding.

This is not the typical thriller with horror/suspense. It's a modern update to the classic suspense style of film-making that Hitchcock did so well. 8/10

There is something alarming and off-kilter about Harry from the moment we meet him; his casual way of speaking about orgasms and forgotten childhood poems to (essentially) complete strangers just a few hours after their first meeting only intensifies our suspicions. Sergi Lopez gives a brilliantly unnerving yet subtle performance as Harry, and he's the best reason to see the film. But not the only one. The director is able to present characters, situations and family tensions that are thoroughly believable, thereby drawing us deeply into the story. The acting is first-rate, the camerawork excellent; what the film needed to help it move into the realm of "great" was a little more snap. (***)

The thing I appreciated most about this movie was the still moments, so unlike the average bombastic Hollywood product that never has a stop-and-listen moment, a stop-and-consider moment or a stop-and-feel moment. (Ever notice in American movies of the last ten years, even when the characters are stopping to think --rare as THAT is-- there is a veritable tempest of Wagnerian bluster on the sound track. Mainstream movies have gotten to where they never, NEVER shut up and let up, even for a moment; you must be manipulated every second you are in the theater. I walk out of "intense" movies, not exhausted, but rather, quite vexed by the hammy, heavy-handed obviousness of it all. --And a little deafened, usually, besides.)

There was nothing obvious in this film. At the end, you feel closure, and yet you are free to wonder at exactly what Harry's behavior meant and about the origins of his unique world-view. That is a thing to treasure, a movie that knows enough what it is about to offer closure, yet leave your mind free to wander over the relationships and lives of the people you have just watched briefly from a distance, and reflect on possible meanings.

A wonderful film.

The major flaw with this film is that Harry's motivation for his patronage of Michel and Claire is never fully disclosed. It obviously has something to do with wanting Michel to start writing again, but I was waiting for the entire film to find out what Harry is really after and I never did. Character-driven stories are all about motivations and desires, and these are lacking in this, a very character-driven film, which harms rather than helps it.

As in 'The Shining' this film is a journey into the dangerous interior of one man's soul. There is an overt reference to Kubrick's cerebral shocker from the outset, as we float above the tiny car and its occupants as it threads its way through thickly wooded, and oppressive, hills.

The hell of writer's block into which Kubrick's writer, and the failed writer of this film, both descend is an inner space of deeply disturbing psychic distortion. After the introduction to the French family, unhappily travelling through life (as you might well say) in their paradigmatically clapped-out banger of a car, there are no more reality checks in this film. Hence our profound and growing unease at Harry's pat and superficial wish-fulfillment: He is the very incarnation of the irresponsible hedonism which lurks in the heart of a long-suffering family man, who can take no more. Even more inescapably than in 'The Shining' - which offers us the relief and the 'reality' markers of other points-of-view - we are trapped as viewers in the solipsisitic nightmare of one man's mental breakdown.

'The Egg' is the un-decodable hermetic prison - insisted upon in a macro-shot of an egg -- an excluding reduction of reality that rebuffs interpretation --- the germ of madness and the surreal --- -- in the French kitchen - whose place in the American movie is taken by pages and pages of neatly typed and stacked verbiage that is as repetitively devoid of meaning as a mantra. The search for meaning becomes a dangerous delusion. The deep-pink womb-like retreat of the parentally-bequeathed bathroom is much like the interior of such an egg in its hard ceramic insecurity. The red dream-arrogance of the off-roader similarly. And the red life-blood of all who come distractingly near is the sacrificial ink necessary to the reductive needs of the self-obsessed ego, for whom primitivism seems ultimately the only authenticity. This is a father who has become impatient of his responsibilities. This is a murderer in the making. This is authenticity as delusion. This is self-discovery as the heart of darkness.

The name of 'Harry' is one of the familiar names for the Devil. He is the original false friend. He is each person's lurking counsellor of the simplest, most brutal existence. He represents the self-destruction wrought by self-obsession. He is Alienation, the partner of Despair.

This magnificent and troubling film finally straps us into our seats and takes us on a voyage into the void where we had supposed the human soul to reside. I cannot think of anything more horrifying than the ad-man's dream of an ending, with the typical family borne - it seems - aloft on insubstantial and unlikely - unsustainable - dreams of the perfect transformation of life's unendurable imperfections. The difference between the first and the last passages of this family's life, as glimpsed in transit, is measured by the mental journey provided by the film; it is the stark difference between our suffering lives and the imagined perfection which is no more than Death's delusive seduction: The gorgeous Plum - the 'Devil''s wife - is barren. Her kiss in the embarassing bathroom - as is the case with the kiss of the re-animated corpse in the hotel bathroom of 'The Shining' - is the kiss of Death.

This is Cinema. This is the force of Creation at work, as in any art worth bothering with. Anything else is just waste-products. And I don't care who knows it. French cinema reveals here its continuing intellectual vitality, capable of engaging resourcefully with the problem of living - instead of merely making a commercial machine to take us for a ride outside ourselves. Being beside ourselves, as in this fine French psycho-drama,is an infinitely better experience than surrendering to Hollywood's empty amusement-park.