Beyond the Multiplex

"The Page Turner": Revenge served cold, a fugue in B-minor
Some degree of realism keeps me from hyping Denis Dercourt's psychological thriller "The Page Turner" as much as I would like to. French films are competing for an infinitesimal slice of the American market to begin with, and this one, a hit at Cannes last spring, isn't likely to reach far beyond the coasts. Still, it's a fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year.

Dercourt is a former orchestral violist (who still teaches music), which explains why he's so intimate with the dramatic, neurotic world of classical music in which "The Page Turner" takes place. It doesn't explain how he made such an elegantly constructed and mysterious little film, although I suppose experienced musicians develop an innate sense of structure. Perhaps this film is really a fugue, or a theme and variations. It's certainly a kind of psychic transaction, an exchange of sexual and artistic power between the two women at its center.

You need to pay attention right from the beginning of "The Page Turner," and not merely to plot points. Both the actions and motivations of Mélanie (Déborah François, last seen in the Dardenne brothers' "L'Enfant"), the luminous young woman who becomes a star pianist's "page turner," remain ambiguous from beginning to end. You'll turn this movie over in your head for a few days after you see it, trying to wrestle with what Mélanie does, and why.

She was once a gifted student pianist from a working-class family, who gave up the instrument after failing her music-school exam. Years later, Mélanie is a law-office intern who goes to work as a nanny for her boss, a certain Monsieur Fouchécourt (the always-terrific Pascal Greggory, with his aristocratic hound-dog looks). Does she already know that his wife, Ariane (Catherine Frot), is the same pianist who oversaw her exam? Has she planned the encounter for years?

Frot is one of those graceful, sexy, middle-aged women who seem to populate French film by the hundreds, and her Ariane is nearly as closed a character as Mélanie. Her husband tells the new nanny she has become "fragile" after a car accident, but it's hard not to see Ariane's passive, wounded demeanor as a cumulative symptom of all her life choices. She's as much a beautiful possession of her rich husband as the piano she plays or the antiques that decorate her home; she's admired and even adored, but not exactly regarded as a human being.

Mélanie becomes a trusted member of the household almost immediately. She keeps secrets with Tristan, the Fouchécourts' lonely little boy, even as she pushes him to practice piano pieces too difficult for him. Ariane discovers that -- surprise, surprise! -- Mélanie can read music, and recruits her to turn pages for a major concert. Dercourt's narrative advances so subtly that at first I wondered if I were imagining the erotic tension that seemed to be building between Ariane and Mélanie (and separately between Mélanie and Tristan). I was not.

Jérome Peyrebrune's camera writhes around these two long-legged, elegant women in sinuous loops, seducing us just as cautiously and thoroughly as Mélanie is seducing Ariane. This film has no sex at all and only the briefest flash of nudity. There's a lesson here that Jean-Claude Brisseau, director of the deliberately pornographic "Exterminating Angels" (which I generally liked), has chosen to ignore: When it comes to sexual frisson, less is almost always more. The hotness of "The Page Turner" derives in large part from the fact that everybody is wearing clothes, and never quite says what they mean.

"The Page Turner" opens March 23 at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York; March 30 in Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles; April 6 in San Francisco; April 13 in Minneapolis, St. Louis and San Diego; April 20 in Boston and Chattanooga, Tenn.; and May 4 in Washington, with more cities to be announced.

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