Indie Film Flashback: With a Friend Like Harry

I'm surely not the only one who remembers With a Friend Like Harry (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien), an oddly intriguing film French film that played in competition at Cannes in 2000, the film is helmed by Dominik Moll. Harry is one of those rare films that, with no apparent rhyme or reason, pops back into my head from time to time. With an IMDb keyword list that includes words like dentist, obsessive, reckless driving, car crash, murderer and ... poetry ... you know at least that it's likely to be interesting. And indeed it is.

What I love about this film is the way it delves into the darker side of the human psyche, especially around relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. We're introduced to Michel, a writer (Laurent Lucas, who five years later starred in Moll's only other film since Harry, Lemming), and his lovely wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner), who have ventured into the French countryside for a little vacation with their three small daughters. Michel and Claire aren't wealthy, but they seem by all appearances to be as happy as a young couple raising three small kids on limited income might be.Enter Harry (the very talented Sergei López, seen most recently as the evil Capitan Vidal in one of the best films of last year, Pan's Labyrinth), a wealthy man who runs into Michel seemingly by chance, claiming to have been a high school chum of Michel's. Michel doesn't remember him at first, but Harry, is so darn charming that Michel ends up inviting Harry and his girlfriend Plum (Sophie Guillemin) to the farmhouse where Michel and his family are staying. From there, things get curiouser and curiouser. It soon becomes apparent that Harry has more than a little obsession for Michel, and in particular with a poem Michel wrote his senior year, and that his expressed motivation to help Michel might just be a lot more sinister than Michel first thought.

The film is more than a little Hitchcockian in style -- hidden motives, morally questionable motivations, masterful building of suspense, and characters who are complex and interesting. As the layers of Harry are gradually revealed, we also learn more about Michel, because of course, on one level Harry is reflecting the darker thoughts about the oppression of parenthood and marriage that lurk within Michel's own secret soul. What I find interesting about this from a societal standpoint is how it reflects the truth about a lot of marriages that the people in those relationships don't always want to examine.

The life paths we choose, the impacts those choices have on the plans we once had for ourselves, and the seeming inability to resolve the conflict between the two, are common to many couples. The way Harry would try to help resolve Michel's conflict, however, puts Michel in a position of having to face, one and for all, what his family really means to him. This clever little dark comedy explores humanity and human nature in a way that more mainstream films could take a lesson from. If you've never seen it, check it out -- and if you have seen it, let us know what you think about it.