On a recent trip back to Boise to visit family I took my sister to The Record Exchange, a downtown institution for more then 40 years, they have records, CD's, movies etc. Presumably in order to move excess stock they were selling 'mystery bundles', 4 DVD's for $3.95, wrapped in brown paper so the contents would be a surprise. My sister bought one and decided to keep two of the DVD's and gave me the other two, one of which is a French film I would probably never have heard about, let alone seen if it wasn't for its presence in that bundle, and that would have been something of a loss.
The Girl from Monaco is a 2008 film staring Fabrice Luchini, an actor with a long and successful career over there. Here he plays Bertrand Beauvois, a high profile criminal defense attorney who journeys from Paris to the titular principality to the south to defend a woman accused of killing a Russian mobster. Now that case is interesting but its not the central story and the accused client (French film legend Stéphane Audran) is not The Girl from the title. 'The girl' is Audrey Varella (Louise Bourgoin) thirty years Beauvois's junior she is a local celebrity and weather girl, only she was not hired for her meteorological skills, she was hired for her looks. When Audrey comes on increasing strong to Bertrand he goes kind of gaga, the girl is distracting him from his case, and consuming his life but he just can't stay away, despite warnings from his dedicated body guard Christophe Abadi (Roschdy Zem) who had a past relationship with Miss Varella and knows where of he speaks. The movie starts as something of a sex farce, but gets increasingly dark as it goes along and its audacious ending had me wearing a big grin. Next time I go back to Boise I'm buying my own mystery bundle, sometimes they contain treasures. ***1/2
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment