Several comments around this movie used the saying 'revenge is a dish served cold' which seems to resume so well the story. A young girl sees her dream to become a pianist broken when a famous pianist in the jury negligently signs an autograph and distracts her during the admission exam to the music school. Many years later we see her grown up as an anonymous secretary hired to be a nanny and than a page turner to the pianist, in fact devising an elaborate revenge.
The thrill and the failure of the movie lie both in the cool and sophisticated building of the revenge, with an expectation of violence that never becomes real. The young assistant brilliantly played by Déborah François - looking here like a kind of a French version of Scarlett Johansson - comes from a socially inferior milieu but one who hints to violence (her father is a butcher). Yet her revenge as much we expect to be violent is mostly psychological, she wins the confidence of the whole family just to break the career of the pianist making her fail at a key audition, and to distort the style and cause pain to her son, also an aspiring piano pupil. The quality of the film can be found in the description o the subtle class differences between the characters and in the intellectual and music filled atmosphere that envelops almost all the duration of the screening. Here lies also however the failure of the film, at least for viewers who did not come to watch a pure art film, who will leave I think as I did, with a feeling of in-satisfaction because as the revenge seems to be too cool and non-balanced relative to the breaking a child's dreams in life. As most of the viewers are in cinema theaters to watch something else than a good camera music concerto, I am afraid that they will share my opinion.
The thrill and the failure of the movie lie both in the cool and sophisticated building of the revenge, with an expectation of violence that never becomes real. The young assistant brilliantly played by Déborah François - looking here like a kind of a French version of Scarlett Johansson - comes from a socially inferior milieu but one who hints to violence (her father is a butcher). Yet her revenge as much we expect to be violent is mostly psychological, she wins the confidence of the whole family just to break the career of the pianist making her fail at a key audition, and to distort the style and cause pain to her son, also an aspiring piano pupil. The quality of the film can be found in the description o the subtle class differences between the characters and in the intellectual and music filled atmosphere that envelops almost all the duration of the screening. Here lies also however the failure of the film, at least for viewers who did not come to watch a pure art film, who will leave I think as I did, with a feeling of in-satisfaction because as the revenge seems to be too cool and non-balanced relative to the breaking a child's dreams in life. As most of the viewers are in cinema theaters to watch something else than a good camera music concerto, I am afraid that they will share my opinion.