French film, The Page Turner has an intense storyline.
I t’s perhaps the best time of the year to make the most of film festivals in the country. There is something for everyone — from Japanese films to an Indian Panorama, and countless more. If you are looking for a break from family dramas and comic features, you could try subtle thriller The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages), playing at PVR cinema all of next week.
What’s distinctly relieving about this French film, 85-minutes long, is the lack of high-octane drama in an otherwise intense storyline. This one is a musical psychological thriller and the film’s director Denis Dercourt, also a musician, gets under the skin of the characters, the haunting notes of Bach to provide the ground for the plot and storyline.
A young Melanie, not yet a teenager, is quietly passionate about the piano, ambitious of making it as a concert pianist. However, she’s under-confident of her talent and to make matters worse, at the Conservatory entrance exam, she finds herself distracted by one of the members of the examining jury. This member is an established concert pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot) and Melanie’s loss of focus results in her failing the exam miserably. Embittered by her results, the protagonist puts her piano to rest and though it may seem too trivial an incident to carry forward a decade later, we find Melanie, now 20, (Déborah François) still bitter and broken. She wins her way to Ariane’s house as a helpful nanny for her young son and quietly begins to settle scores with the established pianist. Her intentions and motive are not once understood by Ariane, who employs Melanie as her page-turner for her concerts. For the uninitiated, a page-turner is someone who is fluent in reading music, an extremely important support to a performing pianist, turning the pages of the performer’s musical notes at accurate moments during a concert.
The posing-as-nanny bit in this emotionally tight film is reminiscent of the ‘92 thriller The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, while in its suspenseful narrative breeds a Hitchcock-ish feel. But Melanie’s revenge is not violent instead it’s laid out in undertones of mysterious, improvised ways that cut through sharply.
Melanie’s gradual entry into Ariane’s psyche, becoming the core of her creative process, is not fully realised till the last few minutes of the film. Unpredictably, Melanie’s lesbian pretenses work perfectly, underhand as they are like her other attempts at sabotaging Ariane’s musical career and family. It’s almost like you never realise the power of one character over the other, it’s really what you — the viewer — make of it, debating self-destruction v/s intricate manipulation. A regular cause-and-effect routine here is thoroughly subtle, as are the understated and underplayed dynamic shifts in play.
