For a film that is not much more than pure, delightful homage to 1930s cinema and the various genres of the time, there is nothing stale about The Crime Is Mine. François Ozon’s frilly farce/pointed courtroom drama is closest in style to his previous film, Peter von Kant — and equally, if not more, eye-popping. But thematically it shares most common ground with 8 Women (which also features Isabelle Huppert), where murder, melodrama and storming female leads also combine. The result is a lavish, briskly witty period romp with an ultra-modern post-MeToo sensibility.
The first of said leads is Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Madeleine Verdier, an ailing actor who we initially see skedaddling from the impressive Art Deco mansion of a powerful theatre producer (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), after he has tried to attack her. Not long later, her assailant is discovered dead, and Madeleine inadvertently becomes a prime suspect. To make matters worse — and hammer home the men-are-trash message — Madeleine’s lover (Édouard Sulpice), a rich, lazy heir to a tyre company, informs her that he is marrying another woman for her dowry and wants her as his mistress.
A chameleonic film to match a chameleonic director.
Handily, though, Madeleine’s roommate (Rebecca Marder) is a lawyer. Both broke and needing the cash for rent arrears, they hatch a plan to get Madeleine off the hook while simultaneously landing some publicity, in a plot point which places the film somewhere within the vicinity of Chicago. And so, Madeleine claims the crime — until the ravishing but ruthlessly forgotten, Norma Desmond-esque silent film actor Odette Chaumette (an ostrich-feathered Huppert) arrives on scene to take it back.
Even with its feminist notes, Ozon’s latest operates at the surface-level, but knowingly so. At every turn, the director draws our attention to the theatrical artificiality of his own creation. Revelling in its gorgeous costumes, set designs (a tyre factory never looked so good) and swoony orchestral score, The Crime Is Mine might not go far beyond a stylish mash-up of different genres — from nods to noir to screwball comedy — but is a chameleonic film to match a chameleonic director.