Le prix du désir

It's hard not to be reminded of 'Damage' when watching 'Sotto falso Nome'. The stories are very similar, except for changing the main character in Louis Malles film, a politician, to a writer of novels. Played by Auteuil, he publishes his novels pseudonymous, thereby not only covering his private life, but also something else - the archetypal element, a secret from the past. As you would except, this secret returns and is about to make trouble. Trouble also comes from the beautiful girl (gorgeous Anna Mourgaglis - I wonder what she looks like portraying Simone de Beauvoir in "Les Amants du Flore") Auteuils character Daniel Boltanskis stumbles about coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally after all?). That's the outline of a film altogether slow paced, spiced with a bit of erotic, but at the time very intense in the portrayal of it's characters. Probably not a film to make a lasting impact, it is nonetheless entertaining, and quite sophisticated at that.

"Le prix du désir" is a very interesting movie shot between France, Switzerland, Italy and Poland. It's not an action movie at all, and the story is strong and passionating.

A French-Polish writer goes to Italy for the wedding of his son. During the travel he meets a gorgeous girl, with whom he lives an adventure. The day after he discovers that she's the woman who is going to marry his son... But it's not all. Someone threatens him to reveal the truth about his writing career -actually he stole a manuscript of a dead friend writer and published it with his own name. That allowed him a brilliant career...

The story is interesting because it shows a series of situations where the change of name and lies are dominant. We see the destruction of a man and of his fame -with inexorability his own certainties fall down.

It's interesting to see that the titles of this Italian-French production don't mean the same thing. In French the film is called "Le prix du désir", in English we can translate it with "The price of desire". In Italian the title is instead "Sotto falso nome" (in English something like "With a false name"). I don't know why the titles are so different...

But each shows a theme of the film. Actually the man pays a price for the desire, because his misfortune begins with the love story with his son's wife. Furthermore, as I said, the fact of changing name of people and things is a way of hiding the truth -and it happens often in the movie, it's a recurrent theme in the story.

Italian movie-maker Roberto Andò directs the movie with smoothness and confidence. The cast is strong: French actor Daniel Auteuil is excellent in his portrait of the writer (the character has also something very treacherous); Greta Scacchi is his wife and Anna Mouglalis is the sexy girl who makes him fall into disgrace.

I watched it because this movie is under " cheating wife" category in many websites. As this movie is in different language , therefore i used subtitle to understand it , but the subtitle grammar and translation is very bad , so couldn't understand much.

Gerrat sacchi did many CHeating wife role movies, and in this movie she is the wife who got cheated on. atleast she got some taste of infidelity.

To be honest, I only saw about 40 minutes of this and gave up because so little was happening, apart from enigmatic looks, love-making, creaky dialogue and a performance by a female lead of flagrant self-love. After it's established that a very successful author (Auteuil) has had a one night stand with a self-obsessed model, who becomes his daughter-in-law, there's half an hour of padding, sex scenes, uniformly unpleasant characters, a tiny bit of story progression (for some reason the model is still sexually obsessed with the egocentric lump of an author) and repetition. The rest of the film may have suddenly come alive, but what I saw was dead people going through the motions for money.