Film
This week in local theaters
THE PAGE TURNER Sure, The Page Turner looks and sounds like an NPR junkie’s idea of thrill-crazy hothouse fare, but the title of Denis Dercourt’s cold-to-the-touch suspenser nods wittily to the potboiler material and motivations snaking around under its elegant furnishings. The 10-year-old daughter of a poor butcher—a tip of the deerstalker, perhaps, to papa Chabrol, whose icy exercises in genre mechanics are the movie’s clear antecedent—flubs her one chance at a scholarship when the concert-pianist judge disrupts her audition to sign an autograph. Several years later, the pianist, Ariane (Catherine Frot), beset by stage fright after a mysterious accident, prepares for her comeback. All she needs is someone to turn her sheet music for the concert—and there, handily enough, is her husband’s strangely watchful new intern (Déborah François).
Anyone who remembers The Hand That Rocks the Cradle will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie’s kitchen, and Dercourt’s overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke-esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless. But the well-chosen classical selections ratchet up the tension—Shostakovich makes a mean Bernard Herrmann—and François, so affecting as the teenage mother of the Dardenne brothers’ L’Enfant, proves equally effective as an opaque dose of pretty poison. The movie saves the full strength of her toxicity for a kicker that’s almost gleeful in its sangfroid; Dercourt’s parting coup de grace is like getting shanked with an icicle. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)
THE CONDEMNED Can someone explain where a movie executive-produced by World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon gets off lecturing its audience about how awful they are for enjoying violence in entertainment? Before The Condemned hops up on its high horse, we do get several cool battles involving the likes of Texan redneck Jack Conrad (Stone Cold Steve Austin), ex-SAS sadist McStarley (Vinnie Jones), crazed martial artist Saiga (Masa Yamaguchi) and a 7-foot Soviet (Nathan Jones) on a Battle Royale-style island where 10 death-row inmates are rigged with explosives and only one gets out alive.
Audiences are cued to cheer for the Mortal Kombat-style fatalities, but the line is apparently crossed when McStarley and Saiga kick the crap out of a woman—and enjoy it. If you enjoy it too, well, you’re a sick puppy, says director Scott Wiper. Still: flaws, double standards and all, this is the most entertaining WWE release to date. When in the second-half of the film, Austin finally loses his temper and gets down to the business of revenge, Stone Cold really heats up the screen. Don’t feel guilty for enjoying the violence. Just thank Vince. —Luke Y. Thompson (Opens Friday)
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