Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien

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.

'Harry, He Is Here To Help' is a pretty awful title for a very entertaining French thriller. I can't claim it is the greatest thriller I've ever seen, or that it will change your life, but it's well written with interesting characters, isn't as obvious and predictable as most Hollywood movies in this vein, and it has a satisfying conclusion. As modern thrillers go, it's a very enjoyable one and should please most fans of the genre. The strength of the movie is in the performances of the two main male leads, Larent Lucas who plays Michel and Sergi Lopez who plays Harry. I can imagine if this was remade in Hollywood and they were played by (insert likely actors here) just how obvious and stereotypical their characters would be. Michel bumps into Harry while traveling with his wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner) and three young daughters. Harry is an old school chum that Michel has long forgotten, but it quickly becomes obvious that Harry remembers Michel, quoting from memory a poem he wrote in High School that Michel can hardly even recall writing. Harry charms Michel and pretty soon Harry and his beautiful girlfriend Plum (Sophie Guillemin) are invited along to Michel and Claire's modest holiday house. Harry is quirky but charming and reveals that he is independently wealthy. His reminisces about Michel's youthful writing stirs up something long forgotten in Michel, and this, along with Harry's insistence on helping financially, creates tension between Michel and his wife. However things aren't as straightforward as that. Harry has other ideas in mind... I won't spoil what happens as the story progresses, that would ruin the fun. An enjoyable thriller, nothing more, nothing less. Highly recommended.

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

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.

One of the first moments of this movie makes inevitably think of "Shining" (1980) by Stanley Kubrick and "Funny Games" (1997) by Michael Haneke: an aerial shot which follows a car on the highway. Inside it, a typical French family who goes on holiday in their country house hoping to find some peace. It's particularly true for the parents, Michel and his wife who seem to be all keyed up because of their restless children. On a rest area, Michel meets an old school friend: Harry who proposes Michel to come and spend a couple of days to his country house. The latter accepts. From the beginning, Harry appears as a charismatic and mysterious character. Who is he? Where does he come from? What does he want? We learn very few things about him or just vague facts. The director Dominik Voll preferred to leave high and dry Harry's origins and it's better this way because the spectator can imagine whatever he wants about him. Be that as it may, we can bring a beginning of answer to the third quoted question: Harry wishes Michel well and he's ready to do anything for this, even to kill...

After a six-year absence (his last movie was "intimacy" in 1994), Dominik Voll made a successful comeback with "With a Friend like Harry" (2000). He seduced both the critics and the public and won 4 French Oscars in 2001 including Best Actor for Sergi Lopez. It's funny to note down that the basic idea for his second feature-length film came to him from a holiday memory when, just like Michel he met an old school friend which he hadn't seen for years. This trivial detail inspired him to focus his movie on the theme of the double. Besides, the first apparition of the two main protagonists happens in front of a mirror. Harry can be considered the incarnation of Michel's repressed drives and buried desires. In a way, he's what Michel would like to be or to do (consciously or not). I think there are numerous examples in Voll's opus and I will retain the three following points: Harry enjoys a perfect sexual life (eating a raw egg after an orgasm is good for health!) and perhaps Michel would like to know something similar to this. Then, Harry kills Michel's parents and every time the latter invites them for lunch or dinner, he has to fetch them: his father can't drive for medical reasons. Perhaps, Michel has hidden death wishes about his parents. At last, by congratulating Michel about the writings he made in high school, Harry probably wakes in Michel hidden desires of writer. Roughly, Harry wants to help his friend to advance in life, no matter what the price is.

"With a friend like Harry" is Voll's second film in six years but his making is absolutely awesome. If the beginning of the movie turns out to be a little trite:how many times in cinema have we seen the trick of the helpful character invading a so far peaceful universe? But fortunately, once this moment passed, the rest makes forget this weakness. The movie adopts a slow rhythm without hastes and opts for the unexpected to play with the spectator's nerves. Dominik Voll weaves a more and more heavy even stifling atmosphere marked out by Michel's psychological changing who seems to become a little unrecognizable to his wife. Besides, she tells to Harry: "you've got a bad influence on Michel". This heavy atmosphere is reinforced by a precise and rigorous making which favors close-up shots and the length of quite numerous sequences. Overrall the director achieved a tour de force by mixing several cinema genres in a coherent story. What is close to comedy in the beginning of the story ends up turning to drama and thriller and the abrupt changes of tone follow on from each other with a diabolical logic. Moreover, Voll knows how to use black humor and certain moments give sometimes to the work an eccentric side.

Needless to say that the cast is largely equal to the story. Already remarked in the invigorating "Western" (1997) by Manuel Poirier (whose he is one of his favorite actors), Sergi Lopez finds the role of his life in Harry. It will certainly be hard for him to equal his performance in the future.

Highly recommended, "With a Friend like Harry" is a work that can be understood on several levels. It's a fascinating work and however we come out of the projection with a little uneasiness because of Michel's disturbing face. Harry's influence has altered him and he looks threatening as if he was going to commit something bad. As for Harry, in the domain of the pain in the neck characters, he is, in the long run, not exactly like Seraphin Lampion in "the adventures of Tintin"!