This is a strange little film from France that is mostly an old-fashioned mystery that also has aspects of comedy and psychological study. It’s set in a small town in the frozen French Alps, which perhaps explains the comparison to Fargo (1996) in the poster, but although it does poke fun at small town ways, it doesn’t have the air of satiric caricature of the Coen Brothers film. It’s more whimsical than that, despite the wells of human cruelty it discovers. It’s also a very odd meditation on the cult of Marilyn Monroe. It’s kind of hard to explain how this all fits together.
The main character is David Rousseau — a hack writer of detective stories who returns to his hometown in the French Alps after his mother dies. This opening is played as a pure joke, as we see that all he inherits is the old household pet, who has been preserved by a taxidermist. He then drives by a crime scene where a body has been pulled from the snow. This turns out to be the corpse of Candice Lecoeur (née Martine Langevin), who was a local TV celebrity as a sexpot model in cheese commercials and weather forecasts. Her death is pronounced a suicide, but Rousseau suspects foul play and begins to investigate. Once he finds Candice’s diaries, we see her story from her own point of view, and thus she becomes the other main character. Indeed, she’s been one all along, it just isn’t clear at first.
The similarities with Laura (1944) are perhaps obvious enough, with a detective who falls in love with the dead woman whose murder he is investigating and the discovery of all the frustrated desire and jealousy that surrounded this beautiful woman in life. But here the beautiful woman is deeply damaged and unhappy, because what the world desires from her is the alienated persona called Candice Lecoeur, leaving Martine Langevin’s own desires unknown and unanswered. That’s where Marilyn Monroe comes into the picture, and it gets very weird indeed. But in a whimsical way, at least if you can ignore the tragedy.
And then there’s the fact that David Rousseau is a popular writer whose novels Candice Lecoeur read and adored. Or she adored the characters he wrote about anyway. Well, things get complicated, in a whimsical way. The town is full of eccentric characters, as remote towns in these kinds of stories always are. The story flirts with becoming a thriller, but it really doesn’t go very far down that path. Perhaps more interesting is the way it quietly subverts or contrasts the cheesecake on offer in Canidice’s dimpled curves with a generous sample of unerect male genitalia and a completely nonchalant attitude toward male homosexuality.
It all seems strangely low-key, if not off-key, for all the clever structural bits and revelations within revelations. In many ways it is the story of how this story came to be, or perhaps simply the story of how a writer breaks his writer’s block. A strange little film, with a nice soundtrack of mostly American songs. The poster compares it to Lynch and the Coens, and I guess that gives you some sense of the oddball terrain it inhabits, although for better or worse it’s missing the grotesquerie and violence.
