Les apparences

Successful professional couple have it all but the cracks soon appear. Is paranoia sometimes justified & where do they stand when the dust settles?

Top shelf scripting, performances, direction, & cinematography.

A minor criticism is the subtle humour present in the first two thirds of the film but seemingly absent towards the end.

In the French psychological thriller ,Claude Chabrol makes more and more his influence felt .Add some Henri -Georges Clouzot's "le corbeau "( 1943)snatches (the letters replaced by email) ; with such directors ,who lent credibility to the French film noir, how could a director fail?

And how could he fail when one of the best contemporary French actresses (and in my book,the best ) ,whose hairdo recalls Stephane Audran's heyday, is at hand ?Karine Viard is stunning , she savors her vengeance with an almost sadistic pleasure : the scene in the classroom where the PTA is gathered ,climaxes the film :she plays cat and mouse with her husband in front of his self-conscious lover ,the schoolteacher who finds a shrewd loophole though .Viard displays false compassion ,false understanding and false smile with gusto ; the male actors almost pale into insignificance ,compared to her.

Like in the best Chabrol works of the late sixties/early seventies ,the detective side and the murder take a back seat to the depiction of a selfish despising bourgeoisie : the heroine 's mom ,a crude woman who is certainly from the working-class is considered an outcast by the husband ,not because she's an intrusive mother-in-law ,but because she 's not educated ,she does not fit in the elite the couple entertains (the dinners are revealing); :one may deplore the way those people go unpunished ,but like in "juste avant la nuit"(1971) , agonies of remorse come back to haunt them...

In Clouzot's times , there were writers of poison-pen letters ;in the computer age,not only you can find secrets on a mobile ,but you can also send intimate messages to as many people as you wish ,and find on internet informations about your enemy .....

Like Chabrol and Clouzot , the screenwriters can create secondary characters you will remember: the exasperating woman , a French literature buff ,who intervenes at the most awkward moment .

I'd tone a bit my praises for the young German one-night lover , who's not on a par with his co-star .

It's a relatively minor point ,and considered at a longer view ,an almost irrelevant one; few directors are able to make theirs their predecessors' qualities with absolute consistency.

The story is very good with some surprising twists. Karin Viard is stunning in this role where she is obviously not presented in the most flattering way and Benjamin Biolay is very good too.