In the opening scene of the French police procedural, Elle L’Adore, divorced mother of two, Muriel Bayen (Sandrine Kiberlain) demonstrates her facility for lying. She tells her teenage children, more interested in a mobile phone than their mother, that a man mistook him her for someone else. Muriel carried on the deception without correcting the man. When he asked about her partner, she replied he was dead. The man, according to Muriel, was in a state of shock. ‘I must tell Catherine,’ he exclaims. ‘Who’s Catherine?’ asks her partially interested daughter. ‘I don’t know?’ Later on, Muriel will tell the story of Klaus Barbie’s daughter turning up in her beauty salon to have her legs waxed. Reality or imagination - undoubtedly the latter!
Muriel is what some people call a ‘super fan’. I don’t know who ‘some people’ are, but we’ll let that pass. A ‘super fan’ is an individual who feels a deep personal connection to another individual, someone in the arts, usually a performer whose ‘act’ is to affect an intimacy, and who follows that individual to every concert, film premiere or public event as is possible without a restraining order. The object of Muriel’s adoration is pop idol Vincent Lacroix (Laurent Lafitte from the Comedie Française) who has been crooning for 20 years. Muriel has written to Vincent some deep stuff, including a letter about the death of her sister. (We don’t know if Muriel had a sister.) It is clear Vincent has met a need that pushed Muriel away from her husband. When your wife fills her apartment with pictures of Vincent - when they are even on her locker at the beauty salon – it is hard to compete.
We never hear Vincent perform, or any of his records, which works in the film’s favour – how can we judge him? We can only assess him on his actions, which is to say that his indifference to his partner of four years, Julie (Lou Lesage) drives her to violent rage. She bangs her head on one of his awards, fortunately not one of the important ones, and dies. Vincent’s response is not to phone the police – he has a new record out, but to wrap the body up in a rug. Then he decides to make the day of his ‘super fan’ by calling on her apartment in person, where she lives alone - her father has custody of the children, unsurprising given her obsession, but undoubtedly a quirk of French law.
Vincent’s plan is for Muriel to drive with Julie’s body in the trunk to Switzerland, drop the ‘package’ off to his sister so she can arrange for the body can be incinerated. We see an ‘enactment’ of the journey. But can Muriel execute the plan? Are border guards so casual as to not check her reason for travel?
Réalisatrice (director) Jeanne Herry’s film grabs us from the moment Julie’s head makes a fatal connection. (Before then, I thought I might be watching a romantic comedy.) We wonder how this will play out. What happened before Muriel visited her mother? What happened afterwards? Is Muriel lying when she tells Vincent the next day that she crossed the border? Will Vincent’s theft of a mobile phone from a local cafe – he uses it to phone Muriel – come back to haunt him? Will Muriel be prosecuted as an accessory to murder even though the death was an accident?
The two investigating officers, Antoine (Pascal Demolon) and Coline (Olivia Côte) aren’t what we expect. They have been in a relationship for a number of years, but he accuses her of being a nymphomaniac – well, that’s new. At first, it is a simple disappearance. Early on, Vincent pretended to search for Julie. Eventually, and presumably with the aid of police dogs, a body is recovered, much to Vincent’s shock.
Vincent behaves in a thoroughly reprehensible way – a ring is involved – so that the police investigation takes a different direction. We don’t see Julie’s funeral – or hear what her parents might say – as we follow what happens to Julie instead.
Herry, who co-authored the screenplay, doesn’t use the film to challenge obsessive behaviour or even the attitude of creative types towards those who obsess about them. You may wonder whether famous people should exercise some responsibility for the image they perpetuate, or is it simply a problem of the beholder: ‘I may profit from your obsession but it is not my concern.’
Elle l’adore is unevenly weighted – Herry has no interest in the character of Vincent. He keeps the ‘VL’ personalised-gambling chips that a fan (Muriel?) sent him – and Muriel’s letters too. There is a line of dialogue about fan letters reinforcing a performer’s self-belief in dark times, but can we really take this at face value? Surely record and concert ticket sales are enough.
The most surprising thing about Vincent is his exploitation of his assistant, Nicolas (Nicolas Bridet), whom he asks to be his decoy so he can visit Muriel. He doesn’t care about implicating him in what might be seen as a crime. The film is really about self-deception. Muriel’s adoration of Vincent is self-deceptive, and Vincent deceives himself that the little people – Muriel and Nicolas – deserve to be used.
There is a great scene when Muriel tells the truth to her lawyer and he doesn’t believe her. It sounds like one of her made-up stories, he tells her. Why does Muriel need to invent? Because it is a way of proving how gullible people are in believing her lies. They shouldn’t be that stupid. She punishes them, which in some sense invites the events of the film upon her.
The final scene shows how far she has developed – her passion has become communal. As for Vincent, he is greeted with something that no creative person desires – indifference. In that sense, Elle l’adore is about the perils of taking the public for granted.
Reviewed at Cine Lumiere, South Kensington, Central London, Friday 13 March 2015, 20:40 screening (le premier séance de la semaine)
