Way back in the 1940s, inspired by the American film noir, the French developed a genre of crime thrillers of their own. They called it films policier. Just like the central character of noir is a morally ambiguous, skeptical, and disillusioned male; films policier, more often than not, revolves around a similar cynical male’s struggle against a stronger opponent. With time, like every other genre, films policier, too, has evolved and has even branched out into several sub-genres such as the daintily named polar (policier with a dash of mystery), neo-polar, and post-noir.
Recent French filmmakers, like Fred Cavayé, in his debut feature film Pour Elle (2008), a.k.a. Anything for Her, have added to the broad policier template by intermixing the thriller elements with an in-depth character study—that of a man on a mission against an act of injustice. The relentless ‘no-time-to-lose’ element that characterises a thriller is set in motion immediately with Pour Elle beginning to unfold even before the opening credits start flashing on the screen.
Divided into the classic three-act structure, the first of which is ‘The last three years’, the film introduces us to Julien Auclert (played by Vincent Lindon), a high-school French teacher, and his small family comprising his diabetic wife Lisa (Diane Kruger) and their toddler son Oscar (Lancelot Roch). Theirs is an idyllic life, which is turned on its head in an instant one morning when the police barge into their apartment and take Lisa into custody, on charges of murder—an accusation that astounds Lisa as much as it baffles Julien. Even though a detective is assigned to the case, and Julien believes wholeheartedly in Lisa’s innocence, as days pass by chances of Lisa’s acquittal become as distant as the mental gulf broadens between her and Oscar.
Then, the day of reckoning arrives. With not enough new evidence that could prove Lisa’s innocence, accompanied by the considerable amount of old evidence that was stacked against her, the lawyer informs the dumbfounded Julien that Lisa has been sentenced to twenty years in prison. With that pronouncement, the unassuming French teacher finds the flicker of hope that he had harboured for three long years get smothered.
Like any other common man, initially, Julien sees no other option but to accept the court’s verdict. But when news reaches that Lisa had attempted to commit suicide, he decides to take matters in his own hands and attempt the apparently impossible— snatch his wife from the clutches of law.
At this juncture, one would expect the evolution of an individual into a hero, armed with an outrageous plan and an arsenal at his disposal to boot. But Cavayé’s (he co-wrote the screenplay) protagonist is anything but an action hero. He is the quintessential ‘average man’, who, when facing extraordinary odds does not perform a volte-face character-wise, but reacts the way any other man-on-the-street would. And in this he is helped by Henri Pasquet (portrayed by Olivier Marchal, director of the superlative films policier of 2004, 36 Quai des Orfèvres)—an ex-convict who had escaped from prison as many as seven times, and is now the author of a bestselling book My Life on the Run.
While laying down the ground rules of engineering an escape from prison, Pasquet underlines the basic tenet: ‘Escaping is easy. The hard part is staying free’. He also warns Julien that those who do succeed in the attempt are born criminals. Since there is no chance of improvisation, others, like Julien himself, are advised not to walk that path simply because they will end up getting ‘burned bad’.
In the second act of the film, titled ‘The last three months’, we find that Julien has already progressed so far down the path Pasquet had warned him about that there is no turning back for him. Always distant from his father, he has now grown even more detached not only from him, but also from the other members of his family, including his brother Pascal (Thierry Godard) and even Oscar. His life now has only one focal point—that of trying to devise a plan of his own to get Lisa out of prison. Knowing fully well that he will not be able to share his secret with his pragmatic wife, Julien carries the burden quietly, not succumbing even when Lisa misinterprets his growing aloofness. Meanwhile, little Oscar tries in his own way to reach out to his Dad, by imitating his father’s actions, which mainly involves converting his apartment into an operations room, replete with maps, photos, newspaper clippings, graphs, schedules, and numerous notes.
‘The last three days’ is the dénouement of Pour Elle when an unforeseen event threatens to jeopardise the plan that Julien had so meticulously drawn up over the past few months. Not only that, a violent act committed by him puts the police hot on his trail, which leads to an edge-of-the-seat climax.
Prison film itself is one of the most clichéd of all film genres. Within its sub-genres, wrongful imprisonment and planning an escape rank quite high. Pour Elle could easily have just been one more entry into this seemingly endless churning of old wine in an old bottle, but for one important difference. It emphasises more on the planner than the ingenuity of the plan itself.
In fact, in hindsight, irrespective of the time and effort that Julien spends on hatching a way to get Lisa out, his plot has nothing innovative in it. And this is exactly where those of us expecting an action-packed ‘rescue mission’ will be sorely disappointed. In all probability, this lack of action, except in the last quarter of an hour of the film, must have been the reason Hollywood decided to remake Pour Elle into The Next Three Days (2010), starring Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks in the lead, and directed by the Academy Award winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis.
However, if one is not averse to shift focus in a film belonging to a done-to-death genre and ponder more on the psyche of an average-Joe, who wants to right the wrong done to someone he cares for not by transforming himself into a one-man army or masterminding a complex plot; or if one is open to a film where emotions are underplayed, reactions to adversity are subtle and not of the chest-thumping variety, and the protagonist is most of the time clueless of his next move than being a know-it-all—then Pour Elle is pour vous.
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