Möbius

This movie is too good for bad ratings. Someone ought to change it. That said, I had a some trouble understanding the plot, because I missed the first ten minutes. This only added to the excitement though, because the movie has some interesting twists. A real spy movie, with beautiful sexy actors and adequate photography. Nice surprise on rainy day. Don't forget candy.

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 movie is a hidden gem. The plot is great, with interesting twists, the acting is definitely great, it's thrilling and suspenseful without the use of any explosions or bloody scenes, it has a sex scene that manages to be spectacular without any loud sexual vocalizations or nudity display, and it ends up tugging at your heart quite a bit in the end. Also, I never thought Jean Dujardin to be sexy. Well, he is in this movie. There are some people claiming the plot is confusing, but I think it's the fact that there's a lot going on and the subtitles might make it hard to follow. You might have to rewind certain scenes or rewatch it to get some key details. Or maybe not. I learned enough French to be able to understand most of the dialogue and the subtitles helped too, so I didn't have any problems, but non-French speakers might. Either way, trust me, it's a very entertaining flick.

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.

The performances that is! A good story, that gets a bit slowed down by some flashbacks. Dujardin and De France are a pair that ignites more than just a fire. And it translates to the screen. As the director was saying in the interview, the main thing was to make that relationship work and it does work.

The story with an international cast and many languages spoken (english, french, Russian ...) might feel overloaded at times, but it still works because of the actors involved in it. The fact you are involved with the characters only heightens the tension that the movie portrays. Not really that many action scenes (one fight scene in particular stands out), but the thrill of it still works.