Film - Jonathan Romney on the stalker thriller that has France gripped
Every now and then, we get a reminder that French cinema, even at its most mainstream, still contrives to do things very differently from Hollywood. Harry, He's Here to Help is a stalker story about a vulnerable family menaced by a disturbed outsider. It is a horror film of sorts, and a pithily black comedy, but the horror comes as much from within as from outside, and its nature becomes clear in the opening sequence. The youngish couple Michel and Claire are puttering along in the family car on a hot motorway, with the air conditioning dead and three discontented young daughters wailing away in the back. All those Renault Clio ad fantasies about France, the open road and breezy, stylish mobility die a disgruntled death in a matter of minutes.
Then along comes Harry, who simply wishes well. He is an old school acquaintance of Michel's, although Michel can barely remember him. But he jovially muscles his way into the family's life and undertakes to improve their frazzled lot. The most troubling thing about him, however, is the way he can reel off by heart Michel's awkward, sixth-form attempts at poetry.
There is more than a touch of Patricia Highsmith to Harry, not least in the writer-director Dominik Moll's cool, distanced control. The obvious comparison is with The Talented Mr Ripley, in which the anti-hero infiltrates the life of a successful acquaintance and dismantles it piece by piece. Like Ripley (not Highsmith's so much as Anthony Minghella's revisionist version of last year), Harry is obsessively attracted to his victim. But where Ripley had every reason to envy his prey, here the terms are reversed. Michel is sullen, socially clumsy and seething with resentment, especially at his family; Harry is confident, energetic, prodigiously wealthy and ostentatiously virile. What can Michel possibly offer him? Only a problem to solve: Harry is disturbingly enthusiastic about finding "solutions".
We know that trouble is coming: in the credit sequence, an aerial shot hovers directly over the car, as if to echo the opening of Michael Haneke's grim psychodrama Funny Games, about a family invaded by two inscrutable tormentors. But we rather breathe a sigh of relief when Harry appears, smiling broadly, like a benevolent genie. The ebulliently macho Harry seems almost to have been conjured up from Michel's unconscious as an embodiment of his unadmitted urges and rages.
Harry is a wonderfully acute study of the Return of the Repressed - and a reminder why, for the most part, we are only too happy to consign our teenage aspirations to oblivion. Nothing is more uncomfortable in this film than the scene where Harry recites Michel's brooding teenage poem at table - except for the realisation that Michel might be about to dust down his long-abandoned sci-fi story about flying gibbons.
We are never quite sure what is eating Harry, although Moll gives us the barest glimpses of a back story, to piece together if we want. As for what is eating Michel, it seems to be that old saying of Cyril Connolly's about the pram in the hall being the most "sombre enemy of good art". The irony is that Michel's writing is almost certainly not good art, nor did it ever promise to be - and his belated burst of creativity seems like a madness as consuming as Harry's own.
Harry has been a huge success in France - partly because it painfully addresses middle-aged male fantasies about thwarted achievement, and partly for its taut, clever reworking of a certain type of French thriller. Some reviews have compared it to Hitchcock - in which case, the obvious comparison is with his Highsmith adaptation, Strangers on a Train. But it is closer to Hitchcock's great acolyte Claude Chabrol: this could be one of his bourgeois satires in thriller form, but dusted down and sheened up.
As with Chabrol, there is a touch of inertia in the measured calculation of Moll's direction. But he has a rare talent for casting, and everyone is superb in what is essentially a four-hander. Mathilde Seigner is hard-edged and harassed as Claire. Sophie Guillemin, the enigmatic object of passion in 1998's L'Ennui, works a different kind of blankness as Prune, Harry's adoring, put-upon girlfriend. Michel is played by Laurent Lucas, usually seen capitalising on his conventionally sombre, moody looks: here, he is cast against type as a weary and rather weak figure, whom you can just imagine looking back to his teenage years for refuge.
Harry himself is the Catalan actor Sergi Lopez, first memorably seen as a confused shoe salesman in the road comedy Western: he is as funny as he was in that film, but vibrantly nasty, too, cranking up the flirtatious ebullience until the cracks begin to show. His charm is quite blood-chilling here, and the sight of him bare-chested, contemplating a fridge-fresh egg - Harry eats one after every orgasm - is among recent cinema's odder images of male sexuality. Indeed, it is such a concisely strange image that Moll does not need to over-egg the pudding, as it were, with a self-consciously bizarre dream sequence in which we actually see Michel's flying gibbon.
Sometimes, French cinema is a little more like Hollywood than it needs to be.
Harry, He's Here to Help (15) is showing in London at the Curzon Soho, Renoir, Chelsea Cinema and Screen on the Hill
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