Harry, un amico vero

'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 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.

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. (***)

While on holiday, a drab harried family man meets up with a forgotten high school chum who proceeds to alter the course of his life through a re-awakening of his school-day aspirations; and through murder!

I like this, alot. It didn't fall into the trap of terrorizing simply to satisfy the filmakers psychosis. Everything followed a logical progression, which in itself has become novel in films which all tend to bend over backwards to be innovative and end up more often than not aggravating us. This was interesting, and sorta believable. A few holes here and there, like why in the world would the parents follow Michael in the middle of the night. But all in all, you could see it happening and identified with the characters, Michael included. Dont buy the figment of his imagination theory, for its bunk. I detest dubbings, but all in all the films a welcome diversion from the same ole same ole.

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.