>>PREVIEW
THE PAGE TURNER
STARRING Deborah Francois, Catherine Frot and Pascal Gregory
DIRECTED BY Denis Dercourt
Opens Friday, May 25
The Globe
A dish of revenge is served up especially cold in The Page Turner, an understated psychological thriller set in the world of classical music. In the French film’s prologue, a promising young pianist of humble origins suffers a debilitating slight during a competition. Years later, a teenaged Mélanie (Déborah François) carries out a meticulous campaign of vengeance against the woman who wronged her, Ariane (Catherine Frot), a wealthy, famous but fragile pianist recovering from a bout of stage fright. Hired first as a babysitter for Ariane’s son and then as the pianist’s new page turner, Mélanie is able to insinuate herself deep into the woman’s life, systematically destroying it from within.
First seen as the distraught mother in the Dardennes’s L’Enfant, François is equally impressive as an avenger whose manner is eerily even-tempered. Though moments of violence and passion are few, the film maintains a quiet intensity and offers a rich variety of detail about this rarified but highly pressurized milieu.
Director Denis Dercourt knows it well – a former solo viola in the French Symphony Orchestra, he currently teaches viola and cello at the Conservatoire Nationale in Strasbourg. Little wonder that few films have captured this world so well or show such a keen understanding of the pressures it places on players, some of whom are bound to get as miffed as Melanie.
"There have been a lot of films about this world because it is very intense," Dercourt says. "Few people actually do this for a living but it is a metaphor for a lot of things. My eldest son, who is nine and has played the violin since he was four, cries every day over it. To make an actual living as a musician is also very difficult. There is a lot of passion and pleasure, too," he adds, laughing, "but I didn’t show the happy side of it."
One of the crueller ironies of the story is that Ariane doesn’t even intend to inflict the slight that scars Mélanie. Dercourt believes that every child experiences something that can seem so huge. "Something that is not important for the adult becomes very important from the child’s point of view," he says. "So perhaps I had that in my own childhood, but I don’t remember a specific incident – if I had remembered, perhaps I wouldn’t have done the film. But that’s also why I made Mélanie a little crazy – not every child who has this experience becomes like her. If that were true, each of us would become a killer!"
The director understands that movie thrillers require a certain degree of exaggeration, even when the film is as icy and elegant as The Page Turner. Though the film evokes the style of various masters of the form, Dercourt says it’s difficult to say if he had particular inspirations in mind when he was making it. "If I tell you the name of some masterpiece, the people who read your paper will say, ‘Oh, this director, he’s so self-confident!’" he says. "Obviously I was thinking Hitchcock but also of the Japanese because I wrote this film during a Japanese stay. In Japan, revenge is a very powerful, important theme. I was thinking of this film by Kon Ichikawa, An Actor’s Revenge. People in France always speak of Claude Chabrol. I love Chabrol, especially the first ones, but doing this film, I did not have him in mind."
As you might expect for a film with this kind of setting, Dercourt was far more specific when it came to the music. He’s particularly pleased with the original score by Jérôme Lemonnier. "It’s so well done I think that you don’t always hear it or you think it’s by another composer," he says. As for the classical pieces he uses – Shostakovich’s Trio op 67 n°2 and Schubert’s Trio op 148 D897 – he chose the Shostakovich for two reasons. "First, it’s easy to play on the piano, which is important since every actor in the film really plays – not on the soundtrack but the fingers are right. Catherine Frot is a very famous star in France but she is not a pianist. She played when she was young – she was proud to tell me she played the Turkish March by Mozart! So the pieces by Shostakovich and Schubert are not difficult for the pianists because the beginnings are very harmonic and they are concert pieces. I like the Shostakovich piece because of its coolness and cruelty."
Indeed, the music on the soundtrack is often more emotional and dramatic than the action on screen. That’s another reason The Page Turner can maintain its careful balance of precision and passion. "We worked a lot," says Dercourt. "Everything in the film is very much worked on. It’s a film that is also about virtuosity and control, so as a director I have to control everything. Every colour, every note, every frame – everything must be controlled." |
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