The Crime Is Mine (2023, François Ozon) (Patreon)

51/100

Very much the sort of knowingly artificial, superficially frivolous picture that I want Ozon to make (given that 8 Women is by far my favorite of his zillion features, a whopping 22 of which I've now seen), but there's a reason most of us have never heard of True Confession (1937, starred Carole Lombard) or Cross My Heart (1946, starred Betty Hutton): the source play for all three films just isn't terribly clever or witty. Not when translated into English, anyway. The two lead actors here, Nadia Tereszkiewicz* and Rebecca Marder, both of whom are new to me, demonstrate just the right slightly mannered touch, reminiscent of the early sound period (Billy Wilder's 1934 directorial debut, Mauvaise Graine, still unseen by me, gets a prominent visual name-check); this unfortunately makes Fabrice Luchini's and Isabelle Huppert's much broader turns (in much smaller roles) seem wildly incongruous. Still, I'd have happily watched these two young women navigate a plot that's either less ridiculous (one of them falsely confesses to murder in the hope of being acquitted and having the publicity jump-start both her acting career and her best friend's/roommate's legal career) or more sharply satirical. Even the resolution kinda fizzles, predicated as it is upon a wealthy minor character solving everything with money, strictly out of platonic affection. Enjoyable mostly for a succession of old-school glamour entrances from every woman onscreen; interesting mostly for the way that Ozon and Marder code Pauline as queer with only maybe 10% more emphasis than if this were a film that had actually been made in 1934. (Huppert, however, holds nothing back.)

* Just to make me feel ancient, she's named Nadia after a character in Burnt by the Sun, a film that I saw during its original theatrical run, as an adult.