There is only one reason, and one only to watch this movie: Mélanie Laurent, a superbly beautiful French actress. Yeah, but that is very little if the rest of the cast embody angry and annoying characters who most important feature is to be all the time with a bad temper and grimace. The plot of the film is not exactly a story but an anecdote that someone has once in a cocktail bar and though it would be a great idea to became a film. Bad idea. It was not.
The stoy is ridiculous and shallow, the characters unidimensional, and since the beginning you know who are the bad guys, because they have only one feature: to be mad and to have bad temper and to have an annoying face. As story of a female killer, this is one of the worst ever filmed. Most of the scenes are a complete mess. Just to mention one that is a complete ludicrous one, that on where Lucrèce (Mélanie Laurent) is under the shower with complete make up, and the water blur it from her face.
But the worst part of the film is the musical one. It supposed that Lucrèce is a killer that is also a contralto (!) who is under contract to kill Alexander Child (Christopher Still), a bass singer, while Rico (Clovis Cornillac), a Flamenco guitarist is under contract for the same reason Lucrèce is, but he suddenly appear as a barock guitarist on a period instrument orchestra. Really? They are to perform Handel's Messiah at the opening night of a fictional music festival in a Swiss chateau at the feet of the Alps, in the middle of nowhere, with out any sign that indicates that in that remote place is about to celebrate it. Not a damn sign with the program of the festival, the musicians or the singers or orchestras that will perform. Not even a post to the press that usually report that kind of events. When the opening night finnally arrives, the crowd in the theater has not a hand program in their hands, as usual on any concert hall in the world, with the bios of the cast, conductor and orchestra. Where they bougth the tickets, where they park their cars...? and so on. Another ludicrous thing came from the screenwriters is that at the end of the first part of the Messiah perform you listen backstage that at the local sound someone is anounced that in five minutes starts the intermission. Does the people that attend the opening night doesn't know that Handel's Messiah contains an intermission and they need to be aware while the orchestra and singers are playing? I only mention another thing that is awful. It is supposed that the anonymous French conductor (Michel Fau) is a very famous and bad temper one, but if you know a little about conducting an orchestra, you will realize that this one is so terribly bad in conducting the orchestra just as was Mozart in Amadeus. BTW, it would Corrado Invernizzi in the role of tenor singer Vittorio Biamonte related with superb Italian contralto Roberta Invernizzi?
I could go on and on over all the ludicrous things that happened in this so call "Musical Festival", that at least for me it is an important aspect of the film, since the shallow plot it develops in a musical environment, and if you don't have interest in that part, well, you will miss a many other levels of screewriting incompetence.
It's so bad this movie, that I don't understand why there has no been remaked by Hollywood, not in the Swiss Alps but in the middle of... Kansas.
