“Nobody Else But You” [MOVIE REVIEW]
Sophie Quinton and Jean-Paul Rouve as seen in Nobody Else But You, a film by Gerald Hustache-Mathieu. A First Run Features release. Photo by Jean-Claude Lother
“Nobody Else But You” starts out on a very promising note. David Rousseau, a best-selling novelist with a popular detective series, has driven 250 miles through the snow to a small French town on the Swiss border in the Jura mountains for a reading of his recently deceased aunt’s will. Anticipating a windfall in property, he is, instead, bequeathed her pet dog, long dead but preserved in life-like taxidermic form. Depositing the dog in the nearest dumpster, he is on his way out of town when he passes the site of what he assumes to be a crime. The police chief declares the death to be a suicide, but not just any suicide, the suicide of the town’s most famous citizen – Candice Lecoeur, the face of Belle de Jura cheese.
Blocked for ideas and behind schedule for his publisher, Rousseau decides there’s a story here and books a motel room so he can investigate further. Candice, it turns out, kept very explicit diaries and the last one is missing. Further, he discovers, there will be no investigation because her body was found in an international no-man’s-land between Switzerland and France, a location for which there is no jurisdiction. Ever more intrigued, and sensing a cover-up, Rousseau continues to dig, with the reluctant help of a local FBI-idolizing police detective who also senses something isn’t right.
At times reminiscent of “Laura,” the classic film noir mystery of 1944, Rousseau¸ like Detective McPherson of the earlier film, has clearly fallen in love with the victim and she invades his every thought. Not content merely to shadow a classic film noir, writer/director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu cannily, and at times (but not frequently enough) humorously creates his own mirror of an earlier time by making Candice a modern day Marilyn Monroe, adored by the locals and undone by her love for the wrong men, each representing the small time/small town equivalents of Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller and JFK.
Sophie Quinton, Hustache-Mathieu’s muse, is very good as Candice. Lush, emotional, sexy, she is an effective modern day, small town Marilyn. Of special note is Guillaume Gouix as the police detective who also believes that there is a cover-up about the so-called suicide and risks his career and life to help Rousseau. Playing it straight, he strikes the perfect balance in what should have been a slightly tongue-in-cheek send-up of film noir.
The star of this film, however, is Jean-Paul Rouve as Rousseau, who, like Gouix, finds the harmony between the humor, skepticism and dogged determination. That he is unable, in the end, to carry the film is not through any fault of his own, but that of the director who had several good ideas, none of which had the follow-through necessary. It may have been the lack of identifiable tone, for when the mood and dialogue were snarky the film moved along, but when he took his Marilyn Monroe storyline too seriously the humor disappeared and it was more about the parallels than the dramatic impact of the cover-up. Unable to sustain a consistent mood or genre, the film never had the necessary pacing of a thriller and was never underhandedly funny enough to keep the audience involved. Instead, “Nobody Else but You” is an “almost ran.”
Opening June 8 at the Nuart inWest L.A.In French with English subtitles.
Neely also writes a blog about writers in television and film at www.nomeanerplace.com. ER