03 June 2007

STOP PRESS: Bex Finds Fun Activity In Cambridge

Almost by chance, I ended up going to see a French film at the Arts Picturehouse yesterday. I was beginning to lose faith in recent movies altogether and so perhaps it was partly because of this that I enjoyed Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) so much. Or maybe it was because the advance preview screening of the film involved a Q&A session with the director afterwards. It was only as the opening credits rolled that I realised that as Guillaume Canet was the director and as the director was going to be in the cinema after the film, therefore Guillaume Canet was going to be in the cinema after the film (go, go, propositional logic!).

In about 2000, everyone read Alex Garland's book The Beach, myself not excepted, though opinions were much more mixed about the film version, starring Leo DiCaprio. I loved it and even went to see it twice, partly because of the soundtrack and partly because Canet was playing the role of Étienne, the guy whose girlfriend Leo's character stole. More recently, I loved Jeux d'Enfants (Love Me If You Dare) about childhood friends who, since the age of about 8, have been involved in an increasingly high-stakes game of dare and mess with each other's heads and hearts a lot in the process.

I wasn't aware that Monsieur Canet had branched out into the world of direction but Tell No One was pretty awesome (gripping, convoluted, moving thriller with a strong emphasis on the love and passion the main character feels for his wife and with a fantastic score apparently composed in only two hours) and the Q&A was great too, Guillaume being very funny and witty and, well, sexy! For example, one of the scenes involved the main character having to run across the périphérique in Paris as part of a big chase scene, which involved this massively busy road being shut off for a whole day, close to Charles de Gaulle airport. Being France, no one announced this until the day itself at which point all of the local radio stations named, shamed and blamed Canet for the delays.

Incidentally, the film is based on the "best-selling US thriller of the same name by Harlan Coben" and some American director originally had the rights to make a film version starring George Clooney or Keanu Reeves (Monsieur Canet was not consistent in this anecdote but with those two, I'm easy either way!) but that was very different from the book (and from Canet's film). For example, the main character remarried after his wife's death in this US version because "it just isn't believable that George Clooney could stay single."


I was cursing afterwards though when I morphed into a fangirl and ran off to get his autograph as I had forgotten to bring my camera with me (or not thought that I might need it) and my mobile phone is pretty '90s and so I had to make do with an autograph in my Moleskine.

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