‘The Crime Is Mine’ Review: Money Talks and Felony Pays in François Ozon’s Exuberant Farce

Theatricality is the name of the game in The Crime Is Mine — for both the characters and the actors playing them. Even when the subject is murder, penury or thwarted ambition, everyone seems to be having a blast in François Ozon’s latest. Based on a 1934 play and set in the mid-’30s, the comedy opens with the image of a red velvet stage curtain, abounds in exquisite art deco flourishes, and is propelled by a screwball zaniness that arrives as a welcome antidote to awards season’s Serious Cinema Syndrome.

Sending up celebrity, the legal system and a medley of movie tropes, Ozon has spun serious ingredients into a zesty soufflé, albeit one that doesn’t avoid a sense of deflation. Led by two relative newcomers, with colorful support from a who’s who of French movie stars — key among them Isabelle Huppert, Fabrice Luchini, Dany Boon and André Dussollier — The Crime Is Mine has a borderline-cartoonish buoyancy. If it’s not as funny as it wants to be, that’s because most of the characters are given a single note to play. But they do it with irresistible gusto.

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A filmmaker of exceptional shape-shifting versatility, Ozon has, in the past three years, delivered a somber, intimate drama (Everything Went Fine), a bold reinterpretation of a queer-cinema classic (Peter von Kant) and, now, a farce informed by a robust feminist ferocity. The writer-director’s adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s play, done “freely” and in partnership with Philippe Piazzo (the duo’s fourth collaboration), is offered as the final installment, after 8 Women and Potiche, in an unofficial trilogy of broad satires focused on female protagonists. In its attention to prescribed roles and liberation, Crime is more closely connected to the latter film.

An offscreen murder sets the events in motion. The movie begins with a shriek, a grunt and a thud. In the tony Paris suburb of Neuilly, a young blond flees a modernist villa and, in her desperate hurry, collides with a petite redhead whose significance will come to light much later. The blond is Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz, of Rosalie), who’d been hoping to land a role in a play, only to be offered a bit part whose healthy salary would be contingent on off-hours sexual services to the villa’s lecherous owner, Montferrand, the hotshot producer of the play.

There’s no question that she could use the money — as Madeleine makes her way home, her roommate, Pauline (Rebecca Marder, A Radiant Girl), a lawyer without a job, is fast-talking their landlord (Franck De Lapersonne), who’s trying to collect five months’ worth of delinquent back rent. Madeleine’s milquetoast boyfriend, André (Édouard Sulpice), is scion to a tire dynasty who prefers not to work — it bores him — and is in deep debt. Regarding his financial predicament and their potential marriage, the solution he presents to Madeleine turns out to be not far removed from the deal the producer offered her. Then Montferrand turns up dead, a bullet through his skull, and Madeleine is the prime suspect.

“Doing justice,” it turns out, has nothing to do with what’s just. Feeling the pressure to solve the high-profile case — newspaper L’Intransigeant is blasting daily updates — the buffoonish investigating judge, Rabusset (Luchini, a master of self-deluded pomposity), latches on to the dubious findings of detective Brun (Régis Laspalès). Rabusset’s relationship with truth and fairness is tentative at best; his eye-rolling clerk, Trapu (the excellent Olivier Broche), fears “another resounding judicial error.” But the judge and Brun proceed along their questionable path, leaping to conclusions like happy jackalopes. Seeing that a proper defense could lead to a disastrous sentence, Pauline, defending Madeleine, opts for a false confession, a wronged-woman narrative that turns out to be a boon for both women’s careers.

Tereszkiewicz and Marder, as young wannabes playing an early-20th-century version of the social media game, are spot-on, balancing earnest passion, comic self-obsession and cool strategizing every step of the way (with an added undercurrent of longing in Pauline’s unexpressed attraction toward her roomie).

Enter, in grand style, Huppert’s Odette Chaumette. She’s a speed-talking, wild-haired star of the silent screen, à la Sarah Bernhardt with a soupçon of Norma Desmond. She’s hungry for a comeback, and she threatens to upend Pauline and Madeleine’s successful ruse. She also ups the already high ham quotient, delightfully kept humming by Luchini, Broche and Boon, as upmarket architect and builder Palmarède. Dussollier makes a late appearance as André’s father, the tire titan who’s facing rough economic roads — it’s the 1930s, after all.

He does his fretting within a magnificent streamline moderne factory — one of the standouts in Jean Rabasse’s elegant production design. (The tires are a fitting counterpart to the more playful industrial product in Potiche: umbrellas.) The costumes by Pascaline Chavanne also capture the spirit of this exceptionally inspired design era.

In keeping with the time period and the mood, Ozon uses newsreels, iris shots, and that good old-fashioned standby, the spinning front page, to help drive the narrative. Philippe Rombi’s score, moving from jazz inflections to pop-flavored jauntiness to more subdued strains, strikes a fine balance, evoking the period through a modern sensibility, like the story itself.

It’s a story that could have been told with a bit more economy, and a few more zingers. But even if the movie’s effect evaporates quickly, during its diverting running time, Ozon makes his points without interrupting the rhythms of melodrama-tinged wackiness. We see the courtroom trial as a performance. Crowds rush in, eager to see the show. Pauline writes Madeleine’s statement to the jury, and the young actress thrills at the chance to learn her lines and perform. Later, surrounded by extravagant floral arrangements sent by well-wishers, she pores over news reports as if they’re opening-night reviews.

During the trial, the prosecutor (Michel Fau) exhorts the all-male jury to make an example of Madeleine for the world’s murderous females, who apparently are everywhere, ready to pounce. In her fiery closing statement, Pauline invokes the heroism of famous women, real and fictional, who have killed, among them the Bible’s Judith and the French Revolution’s Charlotte Corday. That Ozon and his game cast give such observations the edge they demand while maintaining a fundamental kookiness is no easy feat.

The fundamental paradox in all this lunacy is expressed not by the rabble-rousing Pauline, who presents Madeleine as a woman defending her honor, but by Luchini’s befuddled Rabusset: He considers women guilty regardless of the evidence, yet at the same time he doesn’t take them seriously. In this man’s world, it can take a certain madness to make it through the day.

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