Betty Fisher

Set in France, and Paris, but not the usual one. Instead, we see the suburbia, and the projects. A rich woman, famous by a best-seller novel talking about her experience on NY, gets her strange mother at the airport, with her 4-year old son. Strange? A lot! Not crazy, but almost... The boy dies, and strange as she is she tries to mend her daughter's loss with a substitute: she kidnaps a boy of the same age and fit from a woman living on a project, almost a whore. One other story! More will follow, all nicely intertwined. Nice characters, the mothers, all of them, the lovers, all of them...

This is the second adaptation of a Ruth Rendell book that I have seen. The first was the glossy but creepily empty and tiresome La Ceremonie, in which Claude Chabrol's visceral hatred of the bourgeoisie led him to that bloody climax. Claude Miller has done a satisfying version of The Tree of Hands, with a solid script and some excellent performances. Nicole Garcia as Betty's mother is so compelling, so dangerous in her impulsiveness and inability to see the consequences of her actions. I forgot about the stiff chatelaines she usually plays when I saw her look coolly at the little boy lying on the deck, then up at the open window out of which he'd fallen, then look again at the boy while calculating the benefit to her of the boy's death. Truly frightening.

Mathilde Seigner as the single mom whose son is getting in the way of her partying, and Edouard Baer as the gigolo who can hardly believe his luck when he sells a house that isn't his (such an engaging thief!) are both good. Sandrine Kiberlain as Betty is stronger than I am used to seeing her--she often plays bleak loners who resort to prostitution as a quick fix (A Vendre; En avoir, ou pas)--here she has inner resources that allow her to combat her crazy mother, her prying ex-husband and the police kid-hunt.

Miller has a problem that defeats him in the end: how to reconcile the demands of the plot while giving us the fully-realized characters. The end is rushed--I don't blame him for this--and serves to tie up loose ends only. If A and B are shot, then C can make a get away. Still, for the acting, it's one of the best noirs of recent years.

This quietly compelling entry from French director Claude Miller was strangely marketed to American international cinema enthusiasts as an edge of your seat thriller. Based on the plot synopsis (best-selling novelist loses son to tragic accident, then crazy mother kidnaps "replacement son" for grieving daughter, then kidnapped boy's unpredictable mother and criminal friends seek to get boy back) I thought this was going to be good, and weird. Instead it was great, and weird, but not the kind of weird I was suspecting. Despite plenty of opportunity to do so, Miller never exploits or sensationalizes any of the intertwining tales of Parisian misfits begotten to misfortune both accidental and of their own making. He takes a meditative, and at times cold, though ultimately intimate look at human relations and diverging theories on what it means to be a mother. The "thrills" emerge from the fact that you never know what these interesting characters are going to do next. Miller pulls no punches. There's no pounding music score, fancy camera tricks, or melodramatic theatrics. The performances are as nuanced and natural as the direction. This is a perfect remedy for those seeking respite from Hollywood thrillers.

This is a beautifully crafted, visually stimulating, intricately plotted humane thriller--yes, all of those things humane. No, it isn't for casual viewing, people don't slam doors and shoot guns every five minutes, and yes, the viewer must be able to read subtitles to understand whats going on, as even the opening flashback happens so quickly and unexpectedly that we wonder if we experience what we just saw.

This is a puzzle film about parenthood, about children surviving in spite of a crazy world, a film contrasting social worlds and attitudes. Typically French in being thoughtful rather than action-oriented, the depictions of an off-kilter parent are all too real--and there are several of them. Not a masterpiece, but well-worth careful watching

Ruth Rendell's novel, A Tree of Hands, was, as most of her work is, brooding, obsessive, and menacing. In Claude Miller's hands, the book has become altogether expatriated. It is now chic, extremely clever, and quite amoral. In short, very French. Briefly, the lives of a successful novelist, bereft of her only child who has just died in a fall, and her mad mother, intersect with those of another mother, a barmaid, who neglects and abuses her child, another little boy, and her taciturn boyfriend. The film cuts briskly back and forth between these two worlds, from the novelist's lovely house in a wealthy Paris suburb, to the bar-resto, hangout for pimps and dealers, where the other woman is employed. It is driven by the mad logic of the novelist's mother and Miller's strength is the insidious way he inveigles the audience into accepting that logic as sane. This is certainly not Rendell, but it is a lot of fun--think a tighter, tauter, altogether more stylish Talented Mr Ripley. The three actresses who play the three mothers jointly won "Best Actress" award at the Montreal Film Festival where the film had its North American premiere.