Écoute le temps (2007)
Directed by Alanté Kavaïté

Film Review

If the idea of a French paranormal whodunit appeals then Écoute le temps, a promising debut feature from Lithuanian born director Alanté Kavaïté, is worth checking out, particularly as the marriage of fantasy and thriller is such a rarity in French cinema.  Despite being underwritten and directed a little too mechanically in parts Kavaïté's film is inexplicably captivating, its languorous beginning building gradually into something far more unsettling and original, with a climax that is a genuinely nerve-racking experience.  The nearest thing to it is Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), although Kavaïté's approach is more coldly objective and this slightly diminishes her film's impact. At times, the murder mystery storyline is too vague and insubstantial to sustain the spectator's interest and the film treads a fine line between tedium and suspenseful weirdness.  But, once you have accepted the story's hard-to-swallow premise, namely that walls have the power to broadcast echoes of the past, Écoute le temps makes compelling viewing and is certainly one of the more successful of left-field thriller offerings to come out of France in recent years.

The film's main asset is a riveting central performance from Émilie Dequenne, who has not appeared so convincing nor so committed in a role since her star-making lead in the Dardenne brothers' highly acclaimed Rosetta (1999).  As the whole story revolves around one character, a borderline psychotic young woman who spends most of her time doing bizarre things with bits of string (in what looks like a none-to-subtle homage to David Cronenberg's Spider (2002)), it's pretty crucial that this character is played by someone we want to spend time with and who can project her feelings with an arresting sense of reality.  One of the most expressive French actresses of her generation, Dequenne has no difficulty drawing us into her character's turbulent inner world as she becomes increasingly taken over by her freakish murder investigation.  If only Kavaïté had been braver and made more of an effort to blur the boundary between reality and imagination (as Polanski did so expertly in his fantasy-thrillers) the film would have had much greater coherence and been far more interesting.

It is not difficult to side with Dequenne and identify with her harrowing sense of detachment from the world around her as all the other characters in the film are so unutterably creepy.  Virtually unrecognisable in the guise of what is undeniably France's answer to Norman Bates, sinister and likeable in equal measure, Mathieu Demy has a haunting, almost zombie-like presence in the film, and the same could equally be said of Ludmila Mikaël, extremely well-cast to play the enigmatic murder victim whose hobbies include lacerating newspapers with scissors for no apparent reason.  (Whilst all is explained in a frantically cobbled together denouement the plot might have made more sense if Mikaël's character was genuinely unhinged.)  The other characters make a frightening entourage of paysan stereotypes - this, and the oppressively gloomy photography, can only leave us with the most nightmarish impression of rural France.  For her first feature, Alanté Kavaïté delivers a distinctive lowkey thriller that, despite some obvious shortcomings, has no difficulty tickling the fear centres of the brain.  If you thought the crumbling old house in Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) was scary the one that Écoute le temps lures us into is positively demonic.

Film Synopsis

Charlotte, a young sound engineer, is shocked when she learns that her mother has been murdered at her home in the country.  Realising that she knew nothing of her mother's life, Charlotte moves into her farmhouse, hoping to find some trace of the woman who brought her into the world.  Whilst experimenting with her sound recording equipment, she makes an extraordinary discovery.  The walls appear to be transmitting sounds from the past, sounds that, when assembled, will enable Charlotte to reconstruct her mother's life.  She may even be able to learn the identity of her killer...