Isabelle Huppert in François Ozon’s farce – The Hollywood Reporter

Rebecca Marder (left), Isabelle Hubert and Nadja Tereshkiewicz in “The Crime Is Mine”

Courtesy of Music Box Films

The play is the name of the game The crime is mine – for both the characters and the actors who play them. Even when the subject is murder, extreme poverty, or thwarted ambition, everyone seems to be thrilled by François Ozon’s latest work. Based on a 1934 play set in the mid-1930s, the comedy opens with the image of a red velvet theater curtain, is replete with dazzling Art Deco flourishes, and is propelled by a screwball goofiness that arrives as a welcome antidote to awards season. Serious cinema syndrome.

By sending up celebrities, the legal system, and a variety of film tropes, Ozon weaves serious ingredients into a tart soufflé, though one that doesn’t avoid feeling deflated. Led by two relative newcomers, with strong support from a crème de la crème of French cinema – among them Isabelle Huppert, Fabrice Luchini, Dany Boon and André Dusolier – The crime is mine He has borderline cartoonish buoyancy. If it’s not as funny as you’d like, it’s because most of the characters are given one tone to play. But they do it with irresistible enthusiasm.

A filmmaker with exceptional form-shifting versatility, Ozon has, in the past three years, made bleak, intimate dramas (Everything went well), a bold reinterpretation of a queer cinema classic (Peter von Kant) and now a farce inspired by powerful feminist ferocity. The writer-director’s adaptation of the play by Georges Beare and Louis Verneuil, which was done “freely” and in partnership with Philippe Piazzo (the duo’s fourth collaboration), was submitted as a final installment, after 8 women And Bottici, in an unofficial trilogy of broad satire centered on heroines. In its interest in prescribed roles and liberation, a crime It is closely related to the final film.

An off-screen murder sets events in motion. The film begins with screams, grunts and thuds. In the lively suburb of Neuilly in Paris, a young blonde woman escapes from a fashionable villa and, in her desperate haste, bumps into a petite redhead whose importance will later come to light. The blonde is Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereskiewicz, from… Rosalie), who had hoped to land a role in a play, only to be offered a small part whose healthy salary was contingent on the off-hours sexual services of the villa’s corrupt owner, Montferrand, the play’s accomplished producer.

There’s no doubt she could use the money – as Madeleine returns home, accompanied by her roommate, Pauline (Rebecca Marder, Radiant girl), an unemployed lawyer, rants about his landlord (Frank D. Laberson), who is trying to collect five months’ late rent. Madeleine’s milquetoast boyfriend, André (Édouard Sulpice), is the scion of a tire dynasty who prefers not to work—he’s bored—and is deeply in debt. Regarding his financial predicament and their potential marriage, the solution he offered to Madeleine turns out to be not far from the deal the producer offered her. Montferrand is then shown dead with a bullet through his skull, and Madeleine is the prime suspect.

It turns out that “doing justice” has nothing to do with what is fair. Feeling pressure to solve the high-profile case – the newspaper Stubborn Publishes daily updates – comical investigating judge Rabousset (Luccini, a master of self-deluded bravado), laments the questionable findings of detective Bron (Regis Laspalles). Rabusset’s relationship with truth and fairness is tentative at best; His astonishing clerk, Trabaud (the excellent Olivier Brochet), fears “another resounding miscarriage.” But Judge and Bron go on their questionable path, jumping to conclusions like happy jackals. Since an adequate defense could lead to a disastrous verdict, Pauline, defending Madeleine, opts for a false confession, a story of an wronged woman that turns out to be a boon to both women’s careers.

Tereszkiewicz and Marder, as two young wannabes playing an early 20th-century version of the social media game, have the ability to balance serious emotion with comedic self-obsession and strategize brilliantly every step of the way (with an added undercurrent of longing in Pauline’s unspoken attraction to her mate the room).

Enter, in grand style, Hubert’s Odette Chaumet. She’s a fast-talking, wild-haired silent-screen star, similar to Sarah Bernhardt’s Norma Desmond. She is hungry for a comeback, and threatens to foil Pauline and Madeleine’s successful trick. It also adds to the already high ham quotient, which has been delightfully crooned by Lucchini, Brosch and Bon, as high-end architect and builder Balmaridi. Dussolier shows up late as Andre’s father, a tire tycoon facing tough economic roads – it is the 1930s, after all.

He goes about his business inside a gorgeous, streamlined, modern factory, a highlight of Jean Rapace’s elegant production design. (Tires are a fitting counterpart to the funniest industrial product in.) Bottici: Umbrellas.) Pascaline Chavanne’s fashions also embody the spirit of the era of exceptionally inspired design.

In keeping with the time period and mood, Ozon uses newsreels, iris shots, and a good old-fashioned front page spinner, to help propel the narrative. Philippe Rombey’s score, moving from jazz to pop tones to more subdued strains, strikes a good balance, evoking the period with a modern sensibility, like the story itself.

It’s a story that could have been told with more economy, and a few more zingers. But even if the film’s impact quickly evaporates, during its varied running time, Ozon makes his points without interrupting the beats of silliness mixed with melodrama. We see the trial in the courtroom as a performance. Crowds rush in eager to see the show. Pauline writes Madeleine’s statement to the jury, and the young actress is thrilled by the opportunity to learn her lines and perform them. Later, surrounded by extravagant floral arrangements sent by well-wishers, she contemplates the news reports as if they were opening-night reviews.

During the trial, the prosecutor (Michel Fau) urges the all-male jury to make an example of Madeleine for the world’s female femme fatales, who seem to be everywhere, ready to pounce. In her fiery concluding statement, Pauline invokes the heroism of the famous women, real and fictional, who were murdered, including the biblical Judith and Charlotte Corday, heroine of the French Revolution. Giving such notes the edge they require while maintaining an essential strangeness is no easy feat for Ozon and his toy crew.

The fundamental irony of all this madness is expressed not by the rabble-rousing Pauline, who presents Madeleine as a woman defending her honor, but by Rabusset’s befuddled Luchini: he considers women guilty regardless of the evidence, but at the same time he does not. Don’t take them seriously. In this man’s world, it might take a little madness to get through the day.