MOVIE REVIEW
“The Blue Room”
Grade: C
Starring Mathieu Amalric, Lea Drucker and Stephanie Cleau. Directed by Mathieu Amalric.In French with English subtitles.
Unrated. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 16 minutes.
Bottom line: Needed more time for a satisfying picture
By Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
For most of its brief running time, “The Blue Room” is a compelling French thriller in a vintage American style, replete with an alluring but alarming femme fatale and a lush, string-heavy score straight out of the late 1940s. Alas, the story doesn’t follow through on its promise.
It stars Mathieu Amalric, who also directed the picture and co-wrote it with Stephanie Cleau, who took for herself the sexy-scary role. In the first scene we see them together in bed, in a hotel room, a scene which Amalric chooses to give us in snippets, with jumps in dialogue and close-ups of hands, parts of faces and other body parts. It’s a page borrowed from Godard in “A Married Woman” (1964), and it evokes both an erotic atmosphere and the memory of eroticism, as though the encounter were being remembered from a distance of time.
This turns out to be the case, as we soon find out that the man is being questioned by police about that exact afternoon. We don’t find out why he is being questioned for most of the movie.
Based on the novel of the same name by Georges Simenon, the film becomes a court inquiry, interspersed with flashbacks to the man’s family life, with his wife (Lea Drucker) and daughter. Amalric is quite attuned to the emotions of a fellow who knows he’s become involved with the wrong woman and wishes he could just extricate himself without blowing up his life. But that’s a fairly passive thing to play for the whole length of a movie — even a movie with only a 76-minute running time.
Here’s one case where following through on the American style would have helped. “The Blue Room” feels like only two-acts of a three-act story. With a whole other movement and 25 more minutes this could have been an entirely satisfying picture.
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