Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien

When the film begins, Michel is in the hot car with his wife and three small kids. It's summer and there's no air conditioning...and it's not surprising the kids are behaving like brats and Michel is at his wit's ends. When the family stops for a break, Michel goes to the bathroom and there an old acquaintance, Harry, recognizes him...though Michel cannot recall the guy. It seems that Harry is a major fan of Michel and has lots of fond memories of the guy...and Michel is just dumbfounded. Despite this, when Harry invites himself and his girlfriend to their home, Michel agrees and they all have a lovely evening together.

During this evening, Harry inexplicably recalls a poem that Michel wrote when he was a teen. Despite decades having passes, he even remembers this poem word-for-word and Harry decides to take on a new project--to get Michel to begin writing once again. While this seems like a laudable goal, it soon gets strange. First, Harry decides that the hot car isn't what a writer needs and when it breaks down, he impulsively buys Michel and his family a new SUV with air conditioning!! Given that they barely know each other, this is very strange. Second, Harry isn't about to stop at just buying his old colleague a car...he'll remove all the distractions from Michel's life...whatever they might be!

This is a very dark and enjoyable film. It's also, in a sick way, a bit of a comedy. Fortunately, it's unique and keeps your attention- -and it's well worth seeing--especially for the strange yet satisfying ending. The film is taut, unusual and well written.

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.

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.

When I rented this movie I thought I was in for a black comedy, but when Harry approached Michele, his old school mate, there was something ever so slightly creepy about him. Nothing you could your finger on, it just felt not quite right... From that point onwards Harry was always there, remembering word for word a poem that Michele had written while at school, remembering Michele's story written years before. Harry was so nice, so attentive and yet so odd... Was Harry in love with Michele?

Your instinct tells you something's not right but you keep watching, hoping that you can figure Harry out, giving him the benefit of the doubt, while all the while your gut instinct is that this guy is trouble, he's a manipulator, he's calling the shots, and yet you push those thoughts aside as he's so charming.

This film held my attention, I was hooked right from the start. It's classy, understated, with a wealth of detail in the merest glance. With a subtlety that you rarely see in US or UK movies. If you like lots of action, you probably won't like this movie, it moves inexorably onwards to what you sense is going to end in tears.

A very good movie, not to everyone's taste, but if you like subtlety, classy acting, and an insight into how a psychopath can insinuate himself into your life, this movie's for you.

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. (***)