newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

What exactly is unforgivable in the new film by Andre Techine? Is it a wife’s betrayal of a suspicious husband? Is it the violence of a young man against his employer? Is it a young woman’s abandonment of her child to follow her lover? Or is it the narcissism of almost every character in this odd, vaguely discomfiting dark comedy?

Based on the novel by Phillipe Dijan, “Unforgivable” is set in Venice, but not the Venice familiar from tourist photos. This Venice is almost all water and motorboats zipping from island to island. An aging writer of detective stories (Andre Dussollier) drops into a real estate office to rent a quiet place to finish his latest book and begins to flirt with the beautiful realtor Judith (Carole Bouquet). Judith convinces the writer Francis to take a charming house on an adjacent island, and soon enough the two are married and living there together. All seems to be well except for one problem--Francis is too happy to write, which has happened before, his flighty daughter Alice (Melanie Tierry) explains when she and her watchful teenage daughter come for a visit.

He won’t be happy for long. First, Francis worries that Alice will take up again with the drug-dealing aristocrat Alvise (Andrea Pergolesi) she hung out with before, and soon enough she disappears, leaving her daughter behind. Then Judith introduces Francis to her former lover, Anna Maria (Adriana Asti), who is now a private detective. After some convincing, Anna Maria accepts the job of finding Alice, but not before she confides that she dreads her imprisoned son Jeremie’s (Mauro Conte) return home. Now Francis can worry about his wife’s former love life as well as his daughter.

All this action is presented in short, unconnected scenes in which we see the characters at different stages of their lives. Bouquet has the androgynous beauty of a Greta Garbo, which makes her former modelin g career credible, as well as Francis‘s attraction. We see her hanging out with Anna Maria, a totally different type, as we see Alice and Alvise in their former decadence. Techine’s cool, nonjudgmental tone makes for humor that sometimes seems unintentional: when Francis accuses Alvise of being a criminal, Judith corrects him, pointing out that Alvise is a ruined aristocrat involved in shady deals but certainly not a criminal. At one point, Francis hires Jeremie to follow Judith to see if she has a lover, and the scene of the hapless young man trying to remain inconspicuous is ridiculous. Techine has difficulty maintaining a consistent tone in the film, though that may be the effect he’s going for. The result is a movie that seems unwilling to take itself or its characters seriously, but doesn’t have the charm of a winning comedy nor the narrative tension of an effective drama.