Film Review: Anthony Zimmer (2005)
There is a particular species of French thriller — sleek, sunlit, ninety minutes long, entirely content to be the second feature on a double bill — that the anglophone industry has spent two decades strip-mining for parts. Anthony Zimmer is a specimen, and a decent one. It is also, by accident rather than design, the strongest argument against its own remake.
The premise is a Hitchcockian shell game: an infamous money launderer, wanted by the authorities and by the Russian mafia, has bought himself a new face and a new voice through extensive surgery. His girlfriend Chiara (Sophie Marceau) is instructed to pick a stranger off the Paris–Nice train whose build matches his, and use him as bait. She picks François (Yvan Attal), a 38-year-old translator whose wife has just left him, and who is on his way to a modest inn in the south. By Cannes he is installed in a suite at the Carlton and wearing Zimmer's watch. By morning, marksmen are shooting at him.
Salle, making his debut, directs it as pastiche and mostly gets away with it. Denis Rouden's widescreen photography gives the Riviera the requisite lacquer, Frédéric Talgorn's score is a serviceable Bernard Herrmann knock-off, and the film understands the essential joke of the wrong-man genre: that being promoted, however violently, out of your own class is the fantasy and the punishment at once.
It is interesting and well-made film, with "plot twists too 'clever' for their own good, and the objections are easy to list. Chiara is underwritten: an agent with a job and a wardrobe, and not much else. The Ibiza villa climax is daft. The plot relies on a French customs service and a police force that behave with improbable courtesy, and on a man who, having been shot at, sacked a hotel room and had a policeman murdered beside him, keeps trotting back for more. The final reveal is unearned in the sense that Salle withholds rather than plants. It is a film of surfaces, and some of the surfaces are tatty.
But surfaces are the whole of it, and here is where the comparison turns instructive, because the 2010 remake, The Tourist, demonstrates what happens when a film of surfaces is handed to people who think surfaces are a delivery system for prestige. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, fresh from an Oscar for The Lives of Others, moved the action from the Riviera to Venice, the heroine from Chiara Manzoni to Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie), and the hero from a translator to Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), a Wisconsin maths teacher. The script, by committee — von Donnersmarck with Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes — runs 118 minutes against the original's 90. Paul Bettany inherits the dogged investigator, Steven Berkoff the gangster, Timothy Dalton a Scotland Yard chief. It took $278 million; it was also nominated for three Golden Globes in the Musical or Comedy category, a classification so obviously wrong that the the resulting publicity could be seen as evidence of a fix, on the same principle by which football championships and parliamentary elections are won in our part of the world.
The ramek’s' entire selling point, generates an obvious lack of chemistry. Jolie "looks more like a robot for carrying expensive clothes than a femme fatale; Depp, bearded and shaggy, seems too exotic for a Hitchcockian ordinary man in an unusual situation. Marceau had a delicious combo of self-sufficiency and regal entitlement, and that is precisely the register Jolie cannot find: Marceau's Chiara works at the seduction. Jolie is simply displayed. Where the original stages a class transaction — a translator in a borrowed suite, drinking the wrong wine — the remake stages a photoshoot.
The deeper loss is structural. In Salle's version, François translates for a living; his job is to stand in for another man's words. He reads detective novels on the train. Both facts make him marginally plausible as someone who could improvise his way through Zimmer's life, and they make the premise rhyme with itself. The remake turns him into a maths teacher and loses the resonance entirely, keeping only the build. The original's investigator, Akerman, is played by Sami Frey with presence to burn, and that the mobster is a Polish actor, Daniel Olbrychski, cast as a former KGB man with a specific grudge; the remake replaces them with Bettany trying, Berkoff on autopilot, and Dalton completely wasted. The original also bothers with a credible crime: dummy corporations, lawsuits filed abroad, a notebook of banking details that Zimmer finally leaves on a doorstep as a lover's forfeit. The remake abstracts the money and drops the notebook's weight.
Geography is not decoration either. The TGV, the Carlton, the Negresco, the bus to the villa: the film is a tour of places a translator cannot afford, and the tension is partly topographical. Venice, in the remake, is a postcard the camera can point at from any angle. And the ending — Chiara quietly deciding not to shop him, the two driving off with the law none the wiser — is cheerfully amoral, where the remake wants to resolve a romance. The best moment in The Tourist is the start of the end credits. It has the dialogue that gives a fair idea of how Vogon poetry sounds.
None of this makes Anthony Zimmer a rediscovered classic. It made $6.3 million against an $11.2 million budget, and its César nomination for Best First Feature was a nod to promise, not achievement. It is a competent, pretty, slightly smug little film whose cleverness outruns its sense. But the remake's failure clarifies what the original had and what money cannot buy: brevity, an unglamorous face, a woman who seems to be doing a job, and the discipline to be a B-picture. Hollywood bought the hook and threw away the fish.
RATING: 6/10
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