This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 18, 2008 - Many reviews have noted with curiosity that the French film "Tell No One," which opens today at the Plaza Frontenac, is based on an American novel, as if it was some odd cross-cultural aberration: The Europeans are buying up everything!
I haven't read Harlan Coben's novel, but judging from the film, I assume it's the kind of mainstream thriller that people refer to when they use "bestseller" as a generic term, the sort of novel that gets turned into a Lifetime movie of the week or - if the author's extremely lucky - an off-season Ashley Judd vehicle. This kind of generic man-in-peril story, heavy on plot twists and sudden turns of fate, would play the same in any Western setting.
The hero/victim, Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet), is a Parisian doctor whose wife, as we see in the film's prologue, had been brutally murdered by a serial killer eight years earlier. Beck appears to be involved in child psychology, though the only scenes of his practice seem designed primarily to establish his quirky, non-traditionalist personality; he tells the parents of one child that they need to let their daughter eat fast food and watch cartoons, then intervenes on behalf of an angry skinhead who will allow no other doctor to tend to his hemophiliac son. (The latter scene, which appears at first to go slightly overboard in building Beck's character, actually leads to an even more over-the-top sequence later in the film.) Despite his smooth handling of his patients, Beck is, as other folks in the film tell him, still grieving for his wife, who had been his childhood sweetheart from the age of 12.
And just as he seems to be prepared to move on, unusual things start to happen. He receives an anonymous e-mail that leads to what seems to be a Webcam shot of his wife, still alive. Then the discovery of some old corpses leads to the discovery of photos suggesting that Beck had once beaten his wife. The investigation of her death is reopened. Friends start to disappear. Threatened by unseen forces and haunted by the apparent reappearance of his wife, Beck is forced to run (literally, as the film's central action sequence is a very long scene is which the hero eludes the police on foot across a highway, through a market, etc.).
Eventually, Beck makes a Big Discovery that is so overloaded with twists and turns and surprise revelations that I'm not completely sure that it actually covered all of the loose ends. (Who was paying for that safe-deposit box? And why did the e-mail messages suddenly begin?) But in spite of the confusion, "Tell No One" does all of the things that a plot-heavy bestseller does well: It enlists our sympathy, pulls out a few surprises, offers a little glamour (mostly by way of Kristin Scott Thomas and the always-impressive Nathalie Baye), and urges us to sympathize with an engaging (if somewhat masochistic) hero in the form of Cluzet. (Followers of French cinema will also be pleased to see Jean Rochefort looking 15 years younger and much healthier that he did in "Lost in La Mancha.")
There's nothing really exceptional about "Tell No One" - to tell the truth, it's not really very good, even on the level of its own modest ambitions - but it does most of the things that we expect this kind of genre film to do. It sets up a puzzle and pretends to solve it, while providing a lot of fast-paced distractions in between. It's the equivalent of what newspapers and magazines endorse as "summer reading" at this time of year: mildly compelling, deeply forgettable.