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Movie review: 'Nobody Else But You' is an intriguing noir
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In "Nobody Else But You," a mystery surrounds the death of Candice, played by Sophie Quinton.
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Editor's note: "Nobody Else But You" was not previewed for Pittsburgh critics.
Shown in some film festivals under the title "Poupoupidou" (say it out loud, with your breathiest Marilyn Monroe pout), the French thriller "Nobody Else But You" has an intriguing premise: Our two main characters seem meant for each other, except for the inconvenient fact that one of them is dead.
David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) is a crime novelist trying to write "a James Ellroy masterpiece," except he isn't James Ellroy; Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton) is a glamorous small-town blonde who's famous for being the face of a brand of cheese and, as the movie opens, her lifeless body is found by a skier in a snowy field.
- Starring: Jean-Paul Rouve, Sophie Quinton.
- Rating: No MPAA rating but for mature audiences, with nudity. In French with English subtitles.
Candice's death is quickly ruled to be a suicide, but David is skeptical, and moves himself into the gloomy Snowflake Hotel in Candice's hometown, Mouthe (better known as the coldest village in France), to investigate. With Candice's voice narrating from her diaries, David soon finds himself with more than enough suspects in the crime not to mention a sultry-eyed hotel clerk, improbably named Betty (Clara Ponsot), who promptly falls for him.
Writer/director Gerald Hustache-Mathieu gives it all a literary intelligence and a sense of breathless, playful noir ("Were you Agent Mulder in another life?" a cop asks David), as Candice emerges as a sweetly vulnerable Marilyn-wannabe who keeps pills in her locket, and David as a fiction writer suddenly enchanted by elusive truth.
You can imagine the smart, ever-shifting crime novel that this story might become. "It's always by the end," David muses, "that stories begin."
Plays Friday through Tuesday at the Hollywood Theater in Dormont.
First Published July 5, 2012 12:00 am
