Cannes Review: La Tourneuse Des Pages

A young girl faces a piano examination; the piece is a challenge, but she seems up to the task. But one of the judges -- a famed pianist -- lets an avid fan come in for an autograph during the test. Thrown, the girl's concentration shatters; she fails the exam, and goes home to lock the family piano and never play. Years later, the girl -- now a woman -- is interning with a lawyer and volunteers to help tend for his son while he's away on business. When she meets her boss's family, it turns out he's married to the famed pianist whose unintentional rudeness years ago ruined her aspirations. ...

Written and directed by French director Denis Dercourt, La Tourneuse de Pages -- literally, The Page Turner, the job Melanie (Deborah Francois) takes up for Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot) -- is a careful, subtle handling of material that could have been sensationalized or phony but, instead, stays real and subtle -- and, by doing so, becomes even more suspenseful. It's easy to joke that the American treatment of a similar plotline would at some point involve Melanie leaping at her idol/tormentor with a butcher's knife, or something similarly broad; it's funny because it's true. Instead, the suspense in La Tourneuse de Pages comes out of two incredibly strong performances by Francois and Frot, which mesh not only with each other but also with Dercourt's meticulously crafted and careful script and direction.
Instead of histrionics and broad strokes Dercourt keeps things internalized, close to the chest, careful. There's no clanging voice-over or obvious exposition in La Tourneuse de Pages; much of the film takes place in silence, like life. One of the film's pleasures is in filling in the silences and blank spaces Dercourt has built into the film. Melanie is a striver, the daughter of a butcher; the gloss and sheen of the Fouchecort home is both incredibly alien and incredibly appealing to her. Ariane's renown and profile have faded over the years; all the wealth in the home is her husband's, and her role as mother to their son Tristan (Antoine Martynciow) may reward her, but she's envious and provoked by Melanie's youth and seemingly limitless potential.

You could make a pretty good double-bill of La Tourneuse De Pages and The Beat My Heart Skipped, another French film with a strong use of piano playing as metaphor; at the same time, the film succeeds on its own as a mix of drama and suspense: Fully-realized characters with rich inner lives set against each other, as Ariane becomes more and more dependent on Melanie and Melanie begins to take small-but-strong advantages based on her own awareness of that shift. The Page Turner is a finely-wrought, superbly acted film, and while it's unlikely to find much -- or, indeed, any -- audience on big screens in America, it's to be hoped that it can find a well-deserved audience on DVD.