Mad with admiration

Writer-director Laetitia Colombani's debut French feature isn't all that original a thriller, though telling the same story from two viewpoints may make you feel it is. But it is a very hygienic thriller. One murder, one precipitated miscarriage and one mad girl: and everyone in it remains well-groomed, dry-cleaned, colour co-ordinated, impeccably accessorised. Even the unisex loo where demonic Angelique (Audrey Tautou) slips Loic the handsome cardiologist (Samuel le Bihan) a paper towel to dry his hands with the stealth of a love-letter is in spotless condition.

Angelique is a nutty art student with a crush on the doc that he doesn't know about, and therefore wonders who's sending him single roses, spare door-keys, air tickets for a weekend in Florence, a bleeding human heart and even a collaged portrait of himself looking like the President of France just out of the bath. Loic is a bit dense, but oh, so clean.

For a film noir story about a stalker who goes unrecognised by her victim, it's unnaturally clinical, antiseptic and uncontaminated by any virus the characters could catch that might incubate real passion. Mind you, Angelique reduces the mansion where she's " babysitting" for its absentee owners' rare plants - like her mental state, they're under a cloche - to a state that looks like a cyclone has struck. But that's simply to suggest her disordered mind, since Tautou's exterior remains a vision of a girl forever saying "cheese" for the camera.

Pipped at not getting to Florence with her lover - though how was he meant to know, when she never once signed her lavender-enveloped "je t'aime" notes to him? - she contemplates suicide. At this point, the story rewinds itself and this time we see the same events from Loic's understanding of them.

It reveals one clarifying irony: Angelique misinterprets the single rose the happily married surgeon heedlessly hands her from the bouquet intended for his newly pregnant wife. Like Cary Grant raising his hand at a fatal moment in North by North-West, and thus innocently laying claim to someone else's identity, Tautou takes the doc's passing gesture as a token of instant love. Thus erotomania is born.

Hitchcock, of course, would have had Loic hanging off the Eiffel Tower at the end with Tautou stamping on his hands. Maybe a bit of that old-fashioned kind of cliffhanging is what's needed. But the story's construction means the couple can hardly ever interact - and the kiss, when it comes, is the kiss of life, not love. Still, there's a neat little coda that settles a chill on events to come. Wise of Colombani not to show them.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not... (A La Folie... Pas Du Tout)
Cert: cert12A