“The Page Turner” wants to be one of those ice-cold French thrillers that creep into your brain and nervous system. If you caught “Lemming” last year, you saw a nice example of the form.
But there’s something essentially silly about this movie, and after a while I couldn’t watch it with a straight face. It’s closer to one of the campy flicks Bette Davis made in her later years than the suspenseful Gallic thrillers of director Claude Chabrol (the standard to which it aspires).
We begin with a prologue. A young piano prodigy, Melanie, flubs her big audition in front of a famous concert pianist, apparently because the diva thoughtlessly signs an autograph for a fan while the little girl is in midrecital. Melanie quits her musical ambitions on the spot.
Cut to 10 years later, when Melanie, now a pale, weirdly composed young woman (Deborah Francois), hatches a patient revenge plan. She insinuates herself into the home of the pianist (Catherine Frot) as a nanny.
The famous performer has developed stage fright, but she derives strength from her new assistant, who also becomes the page turner for her concert performances. Ah, but our anti-heroine is just waiting for the chance to ruin her employer’s career at the most opportune time.
The movie plays like a blend of “All About Eve” and “The Servant” as the power shifts between these two tangled-up women. The film’s best asset is its lead actresses: Veteran performer Frot is every inch the prima donna, but her regal bearing can’t quite conceal her nerves of jelly.
Deborah Francois appears in just her second film here, the first being the harrowing “L’Enfant,” in which she played a homeless woman with a baby. She’s obviously got versatility, and here she never breaks her unnervingly controlled exterior.
But director Denis Dercourt treats all this with much more solemnity than the melodramatic situation can handle. The outsized absurdity of the page turner’s revenge is just a little too glaring to take seriously, The plot could’ve been used in one of the thrillers Brian De Palma made early in his career, except De Palma would’ve had a lot more fun with it.
Catherine Frot and Deborah Francois star in “The Page Turner.”
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