'Oh Mercy!': Arnaud Desplechin Tackles The Crime Genre With Léa Seydoux & Sara Forestier [Cannes Review]

“There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.” This line, which closes film noir classic “The Naked City,” would fit comfortably among the dialogue of Arnaud Desplechin’s latest work, “Oh Mercy!,” making its debut in the Official Competition of the Cannes Film Festival. Best known for his unwieldy family dramas, the film is a genre swerve for Desplechin. Co-written by Lea Mysius, “Oh, Mercy” may not be the veteran French director’s finest hour, but the uneven crime picture is nonetheless an intriguing experiment rooted in a real true-crime event.

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Christmas Day, Roubaix. Overlapping dissolves of festive lights illuminating deserted streets. A poetic epigraph—not unlike the famous prelude to each “Law and Order” episode—informs us that the events to follow are rooted in fact. Hard-boiled voice-over narration creates a sense of unease. Something must be in the eggnog this fateful night; the city’s police department, led by its captain Daoud (French character actor Roschdy Zem), mobilizes to investigate a series of crimes.

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Dealing with the fallout in the subsequent days, two of the infractions take on an exceptional intrigue: an act of domestic arson and the suspicious death of a woman in her 80s. There is also more than meets the eye to the neighbors who report the crime, Claude and Marie (Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier).

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In Desplechin’s filmography, the city of Roubaix is a flexible space that is easily repurposed for the story he wishes to tell. Previously a backdrop for sprawling family dramas about inherited affluence like “A Christmas Tale,” here Desplechin explores its underbelly. Old brick apartment buildings leave traces of the region’s industrial past and working-class populace. The police department is overtaxed dealing with arson, a serial rapist and murder; like a long-running cop show, you find yourself questioning how crime-infested the community can possibly be.

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As a policier, “Oh Mercy!” is an affectionate homage to crime cinema but also an engaging variation on the genre’s tropes. Desplechin and cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky flex their formal muscles on numerous occasions; a close-up of Marie in the backseat of a police vehicle has the camera simultaneously zooming in and shifting depth à la “Vertigo.” Another memorable, tightly-framed shot shows the suspect providing fingerprints for identification, her hands covered in “Out, damned spot!” ink.

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Subplots multiply and tangle before “Oh Mercy!” begins to pare down its focus, the alternate threads receiving abrupt, expository resolution or otherwise left to dangle. The B-stories don’t provide the intended thematic richness that Desplechin is aiming for, even if they serve to enrich the noir world he creates. There is also wonderful attention to detail in the interrogation sequences, compellingly expressing the trauma of the good cop/bad cop routine.

In the lead role of Inspector Daoud, Zem anchors “Oh Mercy!” with steely calm. He carries the film with a very different energy than Desplechin’s regular muse Mathieu Amalric, absent in the director’s work for the first time since 2003’s “Playing ‘In the Company of Men.’” Whereas Amalric brings fury and chaos to Desplechin’s unwieldy work, Daoud is zen at the center of a hurricane. Among the supporting cast is Antoine Reinartz of “BPM” fame, a recent Roubaix PD transplant that serves as an initial POV character. Like a subplot concerning Daoud and his incarcerated nephew, Reinartz’s naive Louis—a smug grin permanently affixed—doesn’t realize a meaningful trajectory.

Giving layered and powerful performances, Seydoux and Forestier drive the pulse of “Oh Mercy!” in its second half. Together, they are like two sides of the same psyche, with performative gestures hinting at a dominant-submissive dynamic to their relationship. Their divergent testimonies create a “Rashomon” effect. As a queer narrative, however, “Oh Mercy!” is problematic in its only LGBTQ characters with criminality, poverty, and mental instability. The film’s lack of nuance is all the more pronounced when compared to Cannes Competition stablemate “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

So earnest is the initial genre bent to “Oh Mercy!” that it takes a long time to shake off its “film within a film” vibe, coming across like the reflexive, nested spy tale in Desplechin’s last effort, “Ismael’s Ghosts.” For all of its drawbacks, there’s an undeniable watchability to the film, in part a consequence of its procedural nature. Once Desplechin finds his groove—when Claude and Marie take center stage in the extended interrogation sequences—“Oh Mercy!” makes for engaging, stylized fiction. [B-]

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