One big surprise at this years festival has been from Manuel Prada’s wintry New York set film Un Crime. Bring a very French sensibility the crime/noir story, it is told very slowly and plot details are often oblique. I was well into the film before determining the motivations of any of the characters.
The film opens with a man, Vincent (Norman Reedus), plugging in bulbs to illuminate a sexy billboard ad at night. He returns home to find his wife’s corpse bleeding on living room floor, dead in a way that is not suicide. The only piece of evidence is a cab Vincent saw driving away which a scarred door, and a driver wearing a red shirt and large ring. Two years later the crime is still not solved and Vincent is now living in a small apartment, doing nothing except race his greyhound dog on the local Chinese dog racing circuit. His neighbor, Alice, (whose window faces his) makes it clear that she is interested in having a relationship, but Vincent in not able to move on. Played sharply and subtly by French beauty Emmanuelle Béart, Alice takes matters in her own hands and begins to engineer a solution to the crime in order for her and Vincent to begin a life. Without telling Vincent, she picks out a random cabby (Harvey Keitel) and begins her set-up to engineer a solution to Vincents mystery.
Similar to the modern noir classic The Last Seduction, the femme fatale is the central character here. The plot and thematic depth here is even more complex, especially considering that the story is advanced more from conversations between the characters than actions, there are no helping hands of exposition or the usual voice over techniques. Alice aims for a romantic connection with Vincent and trashy lust with the cabbie. Harvey Keitel brings a complexity to the patsy that is not typical in noir. His character is a good judge of character, quickly pegging Alice to be a sad and lonely type (indeed what little back history there is of Alice involves serving community service for some previous unnamed crime; she has no friends or acquaintances beyond Vincent). He looks like a thug, but carves boomerangs in his spare time. A fitting metaphor for how crimes or the evidence of them (real or manufactured) can come back suddenly without warning, often long after things were set in motion.
Rainy shots of the various bridges and buildings in New York at night or dense, colour desaturated urban streets at day are complemented with a sultry rhythmic jazz score. A sex scene is shot in only with whispers of clothing contrasted with constant elevated trains going by in the background. Love in Un Crime is Hell. Even as Keitel’s character suspects this from Alice, he knows it is the only love he has ever had and is willing to go along with the fantasy, even when things get much more violent. The ambiguous first half has the effect of lulling things which escalate in the second half into some frankly shocking actions (think Noe or Haneke) and plot trajectories which will not be spoiled here. Reversals of intention, cynical acceptance, and the darkest kind of romantic love are all swirl around Béart who gives a riveting performance as the most dangerous of determined beauties.