The Crime Is Mine
The acting ensemble is the chief reason to seek out this screwball pastiche from François Ozon – particularly the joyously hammy turn from Isabelle Huppert
When you churn out features with François Ozon's regularity, it’s inevitable you can sometimes be caught coasting. The Crime is Mine is a fun but forgettable screwball pastiche in which a high-profile murder trial sparks a media frenzy, with echoes of Roxie Hart (1942). Struggling actress Madeleine (Tereszkiewicz) sees the courtroom as the ultimate stage to showcase her talents. She falsely admits to killing a lecherous impresario, enlisting her similarly penniless roommate Pauline (Marder) as her lawyer, in the hope that this will be the break they both need.
Ozon pits Madeleine and Pauline against a patriarchal system, but the film’s stabs at inequality and misogyny feel like easy pickings; these canny young women have little trouble outwitting a roster of bumbling men. Ozon generally keeps things light and zippy, and he has some fun with the film’s structure, repeatedly running the murder in flashbacks as Madeleine offers contradictory confessions.
As ever, Ozon has a sure hand with actors, and the ensemble he's assembled is The Crime Is Mine's strongest suit. Tereszkiewicz and Marder are an appealing pair (with Pauline’s understated sapphic yearning adding a note of poignancy) and Fabrice Luchini is reliably entertaining as a clueless prosecutor, but the film is comprehensively hijacked in its final third by Isabelle Huppert. She blasts into the picture in full-on diva mode as a grand dame of the silent era now eyeing her chance at a comeback, delivering an outrageously hammy performance. She’s clearly having a ball, and her sense of enjoyment is irresistible.
Released 18 Oct by Parkland Pictures; certificate 12A