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Tell No One review
:. Director: Guillaume Canet
:. Starring: François Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze
:. Running Time: 2:05
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: France
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I was looking forward to Tell No One, a thriller by actor/director Guillaume Canet (Merry Christmas, Love Me if You Dare) whose filmography both as an actor and director proves that he likes to take risk, despite his good looks.
Tell No One evolves around the mystery surrounding the abduction of the wife of a pediatrician (FranÃâ§ois Cluzet) and how he is haunted by her disappearance. For a while I was really absorbed by the story until I realized that the film started to lose focus, not knowing its own identity and where it was going, oscillating between drama, comedy, thriller, social commentary and action, until everything ballooned into a series of grotesque sequences and plot turns.
While this is not his debut as a director (it's actually his second feature and the follow up to the promising Mon Idole), Canet seems to suffer from the first-time director syndrome, where filmmakers tend to show everything they like and learned in their first effort — think of Tell No One as Claude Chabrol (for the provincial bourgeoisie's dark secrets) meets Love Me if You Dare (for the purity and child-like aspect of the love story) meets Hidden (for the mysterious atmosphere, the importance of messages and the use of video cameras).
Tell No One is also supported by a cast which is too famous for its own good: when you have Nathalie Baye (Le Petit Lieutenant), Jean Rochefort (The Closet), Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient) & André Dussollier (A Very Long Engagement) in a movie, you know they're not there for innocent cameos, which quickly gives you an idea about who is involved.
But what is probably the most painful here is the interminable ending where an incriminated character tells it all, with the director juxtaposing flashbacks in the background to make us relive the facts. Not only this is as clichéd as it can be but it's usually a lazy trick used to hide the failure of the screenwriter to make us believe his story has a natural and logic narrative.
Despite a good ensemble cast and a few intriguing moments, the title gives a warning spectators should follow scrupulously.
Fred Thom
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