La Tourneuse de Pages is a much sexier title than The Page Turner, but that the French effect for you. I missed this movie at the French Film Festival earlier this year so decided to hike out to Paddington to catch it at the Chauvel.
The Page Turner is the course of a young girl's slow-burning revenge. As a child, Mélanie fails a piano exam due to a careless act by one of the examiners, a famous pianist by the name of Ariane Fouchécourt. Several years later, Mélanie has a chance to exact her revenge for never making it into the conservatorium when she takes an internship at a law firm. Her boss, Jean, happens to be Ariane's husband.
When Mélanie's internship ends, she offers to look after Jean's son while Jean is abroad and Ariane practices for a major concert with her trio. Patiently, Mélanie embeds herself into Ariane's life over the space of a few weeks until she is Ariane's page turner for the concert, followed by an important audition for an international agent.
It's not hard to guess what happens as the plot moves along. The story is quite fluid, moving from incident to incident without trouble, but even an original storyline like this is plagued by predictability. The direction reveals too much too soon and there are no subplots to feed the main arc, so the movie turns out to be too obvious and single-minded to be special.
There are glorious moments, though, where the film does get it right. The first is young Mélanie's restrained anger as she leaves the exam room, silent tears staining her face. She enters the practice room to fetch her coat and attempts to sabotage another girl's shot at entering the conservatorium by flinging the lid of the piano down on fingers that barely escape the crunch. That's the only discord we see; at home, she quietly packs her music away, never to play again.
Déborah François, as the older Mélanie, does a fantastic job as the silent but deadly avenger. Although no one dies, you can be sure that beyond the end of the film, the characters will remember her the same way that young Mélanie had Ariane at the forefront of her failure. This is where the second glorious moment comes into play. Laurent, the cellist in Ariane's trio, makes some unwelcome advances towards Mélanie only to find his cello spike embedded in his foot. It's nice and bloody payment from the quiet one.
Yes, Mélanie has her revenge, but for me it was not satisfying. She leaves much more destruction than you would think her unrealised pianist dreams would manifest, and the circumstances are too perfect, too contrived for its execution, making it too easy for her to achieve her goal. The warning is, though, watch out for the quiet ones.
Film rating: 5/10
Enjoyment rating: 6/10
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