The final film directed by Alain Corneau, who died in August 2010, aged 67, Love Crime is a chilly thriller, a contrived and laboured tale of sex, money, power, deceit, revenge and murder.
It’s a botched effort which squanders the talents of Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, fine actresses who can’t overcome the numerous holes in the screenplay by Corneau and Natalie Carter.
Scott Thomas plays Christine, the high-powered head of the French subsidiary of a multi-national company. Sagnier is her assistant and protégée Isabelle. In the opening sequence, Isabelle and Christine are in the latter’s palatial Paris home preparing for a business trip to Cairo.
A Sapphic attraction is clearly suggested as Christine tells the young woman she smells good and kisses her on the neck, despite the fact their rendezvous concludes as Christine’s handsome lover Philippe (Patrick Mille) arrives.
To Isabelle’s surprise, her boss orders her to go to Cairo to clinch the deal, accompanied by Philippe, the head accountant for a firm retained by Christine’s company.
Why would an outsider be needed for such a mission? No logical reason except to create the opportunity for Isabelle and Philippe, with zero foreplay, as it were, to tear off each other’s clothes and bonk.
Back in Paris they continue their affair, apparently with Christine’s tacit blessing. 'I love you Isabelle," she says, a sentiment which is reciprocated. Perversely, Isabelle questions Philippe on how he feels when he’s making love with Christine. He replies that she always thinks of herself, even in bed, which would indicate Christine’s a lousy lay.
But Christine gets mad when the ambitious Isabelle pulls off another deal without her knowledge, which impresses their visiting US executives and looks like crimping Christine’s chances of getting a promotion to the New York office, for which she’d been angling. Isabelle’s co-worker Daniel (Guillaume Marquet) had urged her to stop letting her boss claim the credit for her ideas and hard work, and she finally agreed.
Meanwhile, Christine tells Philippe he needs to make restitution for the millions of euros he’d bilked from her company, conveniently leaving a record of their discussion which would later be easily discovered.
Christine publicly humiliates Isabelle, causing tears and a tantrum, but the young woman is such a duplicitous schemer you may well think she’s getting her just desserts.
The titular crime, ensuing police investigation and denouement are all belaboured and predictable.
Scott Thomas plays a thoroughly unlikable woman who’s ruthless, manipulative, selfish and cold. It’s revealed that Isabelle’s predecessor in that job ended up in a mental hospital so one can conclude that Christine sadistically enjoys tormenting underlings.
Sagnier spends a lot of the movie in a dazed, shell-shocked state when she’s not crying or moping, but it’s all a ruse.
In January Variety reported that French production company SBS Films is planning an English-language remake entitled Passion, switching the location to the UK, to be directed by Brian De Palma. He hasn’t made a movie since 2007’s Redacted but one can only hope his version will fix those plot holes and inject a much higher degree of tension into the narrative.
