Director: Rebecca Ziotowski
Cast: Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: The movie could have been about almost anything, with the promises that poster is making, and I would have been on board. Foster is incapable of picking a worthless film, and even less constitutionally able to give a bad performance in a movie that maybe doesn’t qutie rank among her best.
You all see where I’m going with this one?
There’s an inconsistency at play here, and it can be just as singularly tied to that poster. We’re meant to believe that this is going to be an exceeding french romp—a cosy mystery*, even—with Jodie Foster running around outsmarting clever miscrients, using only card catalogs as her weapon.
I’m happy to report that Jodie Foster is indeed, in the film, and she is indeed quite good in it. Also, there is a scene that features a card catalog, and there is even an undercurrent throughout the film where Foster’s character, Lillian Steiner, is resolutely just behind the times when it comes to the media with which she records and organizes information, but it’s hardly a movie about card catalogs. It probably would be too much to hope for to have Foster wielding other antiques, especially a microfiche reader, as she was the star of one of the great microfiche reader sequences in all of moviedom in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
This might all be easily, if even reflexively, forgiven. It’s unfair to judge any movie by its poster—except for, perhaps, The Rocketeer (1991)—but the mystery proffered leaves a bit to be desired. We spend long stretches of the film confident that something unpleasant is goin on, veer slightly as things move to the third act that Steiner is perhaps crazier than she lets on, all coalescing into an anti-climax.
*A term I am obliged to loath.