Tell No One

Sometimes it requires the eyes of a foreigner to establish the old new once again. In adapting American crime writer Harlan Coben's 2001 novel Tell No One, French movie maker Guillaume Canet brings a distancing Gallic fracturedness to a straight mystery. By doing so, Canet adds layers that probably weren't there in the original story merely also puts us at a distance from its more pulp elements, which are left hand adrift in this calmly-paced homage to Hitchcock's wrong-man scenarios. An odd policier, Tell No One isn't without its rewards, merely is as well certainly not without problems.


Unfolding with fertile ripeness in a long and languorous day and evening in the French countryside, where some siblings and their respective others share a meal and sharp-edged conversation at the old family house, the film plays with the notion of barely-concealed secrets and a hint of rottenness. When Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet) chases his wife Margot (Marie-Josee Croze) through a forested tract lined with lushly bloom flowers, the scene is romantic only weighted with death -- it wouldn't surprise you to notice out that the filth was so rich due to bodies being inhumed there. Like the childhood sweethearts they once were, Alex and Margot swim playfully in a pocket-sized pond and then curl up naked in the warm night air on a floating raft. She goes ashore; there are sounds of a fight. Alex, panic-struck, swims for the sour grass only to get whacked unconscious by an spiritual world assailant.


Cut to eight long time later, and Alex is going through and through the motions as a pediatrician, acquitted in his wife's bump off after her body was found, but now left without much of a reason to live. There are glimpses that Alex may in fact be quite honorable at his job, only Canet (world Health Organization co-wrote the screenplay with Philippe Lefebvre, an worker appearing here as a police lieutenant) is more intent on the stasis of Alex's life, how the shards of his former life never quite a fit back together. Canet is quite good at this sort of thing, edging tV audience into this mystery sideway and making it