Based on a true-crime mystery from the 1970s South of France, this could have been a companion piece to the marvelous The Connection—if only it had characters we could care about, a sense of suspense or even a clear idea of the story it wants to tell. Not even the luminous and steely Catherine Deneuve, as Nice casino manager Renée Le Roux, can save this. It’s all to do with Le Roux’s daughter, Agnès (Adèle Haenel), returning home to France after the breakup of her marriage and instantly falling in with Le Roux’s attorney and business advisor, Maurice (Guillaume Canet), a canny manipulator secretly scheming to help a mobster (Jean Corso) take over the casino. Maneuvering Agnès and her small stake in the business is so easy for him that it is dramatically inert; she is so shockingly naïve that even Maurice is openly astonished by her immaturity. This isn’t so much a crime drama as a soap opera of corruption and obsession, and a slow-moving one at that, with any hint of the high stakes in play for these characters all but ignored.
By
MaryAnn Johanson