Möbius

"I can't steal but I can still seduce." Alice (De France) is a trader who is caught up in a deadly ring of money laundering. When a powerful Russian finds her and forces her to help him she meets Moïse (Dujardin), a Russian operative. Her and Moïse strike up a fast relationship both trying to hide who they really are from each other, but you can only hide the truth for so long. This is a hard movie to review, mainly because the plot was a little hard to follow, for me at least. It was really just a movie about a type of espionage triangle and you begin to question everyone's motives. It was pretty slow moving and went back and forth between french and English so if you aren't a big foreign movie fan that is your warning. This is a movie for a select group of people. For me it was a little too slow and predictable for me to fully get into. Overall, nothing that I would rush and see or see again. I give this a C+.

It doesn't happen often, but once in a while, it's possible for a film to be both under- and over-cooked at the same time. Writer-director Eric Rochant's Möbius is a case in point. The double-crossed romance at its heart flirts with being fascinating but doesn't quite get there, buried as it is within the conspiracy-laden, high-stakes world of big business and covert intelligence.

While monitoring the offshore activities of crooked Russian tycoon Ivan Rostrovsky (Tim Roth), Russian secret agent Gregory Lioubov (Jean Dujardin) talent-spots Alice Redmond (Cecile De France), a brilliant international banker so spectacular she was banned from working in America after the Lehman Bros scandal. Not realising that Alice is already working with the CIA, Gregory directs his team to recruit and use her to get closer to Rostrovsky. Inevitably, secrets and conspiracies pile up, with Gregory only complicating matters when he stumbles into a forbidden relationship with Alice.

There are a few moments and ideas that shine through Möbius, no doubt the ones that most inspired Rochant to construct a script around them. These come mainly in the relationship between Alice and Gregory – or Moses, as she knows him. Their connection is under-written, suggested more through soul-shuddering orgasms than what is technically in the script. Nevertheless, Dujardin and de France just about make it work, whether Gregory is brazenly deceiving his colleagues to answer a call from Alice or they're sharing a final, quietly devastating scene together.

But their efforts are let down by an overly complicated plot, one that feels as if it doesn't make much sense even when all is revealed. The motivations of every agency involved are murky at best. The CIA comes off the worst, its agents lurking stupidly through a handful of scenes as their ties with Alice ebb and flow in quite mysterious fashion. The Americans in the cast must also grapple with the unwieldy, soapy chunks of dialogue they're given. As a result, the film loses steam when it should gain tension.

A Möbius strip, as a character explains quite late in the film, is a deceptively simple phenomenon. Half-twist a strip of paper, fasten the two ends together, et voila: something utterly simple rendered impossibly complicated – a never-ending loop, a two-dimensional model with only one surface. Rochant meant for the strip to be a metaphor for the dilemma in which his characters find themselves. It's rather appropriate, though perhaps not quite how he intended it, that the strip also serves as an apt metaphor for the entire film.

This is an intricate bittersweet drama and love story much more than it is an action/adventure or thriller. The pacing is methodical and consistent while the production value is quite high, with excellent cinematography and really well laid out interior and exterior scenes. It paints a captivating portrait of high risk banking and espionage just as it does Monaco and Moscow.

The acting is good with a well rounded cast. There was one odd and weird sequence of close up facial shots, but other than that I found the film quite compelling and even moving, with few flaws.

If you are looking for explosions, car chases and gun fights look elsewhere. Watch this film if you want to be immersed in a human story draped in exotic locales and professions.

For a change, it is eventful to watch non-Hollywood type of thriller, with more mind-twists and less chases or killings. Romantic angle is usually proper as well, especially among the French and by talented actors like Jean Dujardin and Cécile de France, but the film in question became too wistful and tensions faded away even where appropriate... True, the chemistry between them was pleasant and erotic scenes added "French touch" but - as mentioned - one could easily forget the background with at least 3 secret services striving for getting their aims fulfilled.

Moreover, the story became too complex as well at times, but what I liked was multiple solutions in the ending, and the very final scene provides food for thought. The use of Russian actors was good (as it is a Russian-French film), however, the contrast of pure Russian spoken by them and that by Dujardin and Tim Roth (depicting Russian gangster Rostovsky) became too obvious.

Nevertheless, if you like calm spy films, then Möbius is more than an entertainment.

Actress Cécile De France and Oscar Best Actor 2011 Winner Jean Dujardin both played in the French film "Möbius (2013)". Their love making scene in this film just looked so realistically beautiful. Cécile De France played the heroine who enjoyed sex to the extreme with her subtle facial reactions responding to every movement, while Jean Dujardin focused on her face silently yet so intensely. The scene played so serenely beautiful, showing the big difference from a bad porno film.

The whole process from when he sat in the night club spotting her came in with Tim Roth, to she approached him after she spotted him looking at her, then to the sudden return after she left, then to the bar scene where they drank and talked, then to the bed making love. the whole segment was one of the best directed and performed what a good movie should and could be.

By viewing this almost lifelike performance in an unreal visual drama, you would learn how really good actors could perform, especially those French actors.