“Oh Mercy!” – Movie Review

The first week at the 57th New York Film Festival, I attended the North American premiere of the new French crime drama by Arnaud Desplechin, “Oh Mercy!” (AKA “Roubaix, une lumière”).  

Synopsis

Can a police chief solve the case of an elderly woman who was murdered?

Story

Northern France is the home to Roubaix, a hardscrabble city where nothing good ever happens.  This makes it the perfect place for Captain Yacoub Daoud (Roschdy Zem) to police – especially considering he grew up there.  A French-Algerian, he understands Roubaix perfectly. In one neighborhood, Lucette (Marie Frandsen), an 83 year old woman has just died – but in this case, it doesn’t appear to have come from natural causes.  Based on the forensic evidence, it suggests she was murdered. Ligature marks around the woman’s neck seem to indicate she was strangled. Why and by whom? 

During the investigation, Lucette’s neighbors become “persons of interest”; Claude (Léa Seydoux) and Marie (Sara Forestier) are roommates.  These two young women live in an apartment a couple of doors down. When other leads turn up empty, the police start to concentrate on Claude and Marie.  Both women are brought into police headquarters for questioning where they are interrogated separately. Each woman seems to want to implicate the other; while both women obviously want to avoid prison, Claude has a major stake in the outcome of this case – she has a six year old son currently living in a foster home and is worried she may never see him again.

After spending the night incarcerated, the two women are questioned together in order to reconcile their stories.  It eventually comes out that Marie is in love with Claude, who cannot reciprocate Marie’s affection. Whatever degree of participation either one had in this crime, Marie does not want to be separated from Claude, no matter what.  In order to iron out matters, Daoud and his colleagues take Claude and Marie back to the scene of the crime in order to show the police what each did and how it was done. But when the two quibble over details in the story and it becomes unclear what the truth is, can the police hold them accountable?  

Review

Two years ago, Desplechin’s “Ismael’s Ghosts” played at the New York Film Festival; it was a sometimes entertaining hit-or-miss movie but a story in which the director seemed to be quite comfortable.  An unusual turn for Desplechin, “Oh Mercy!” is well-told in terms of displaying police procedures and humanizing the police captain in charge of the investigation.  However, given that it is based on a true story, it might be the case that the director tried too hard to stick to the facts and sacrificed some of the drama that could have made the film a more engaging experience for viewers.  

What might have enhanced “Oh Mercy!” a bit more could have been learning about the two suspects.  Instead, we see this story through the eyes of Capt. Douad and we learn whatever he learns when it happens; maybe this is to keep it a mystery to the audience as well as the police.  Also, perhaps to illustrate Douad’s versatility, we see him investigating other crimes in the area; there’s a considerable amount of screen time spent on this when the time could have been better spent with background information about the two suspects.  The other things Douad is concurrently working on seem a distraction.     

Following the screening, there was an interview with director Arnaud Desplechin.  Desplechin said the reason why he decided to make “Oh, Mercy!” is because his last few movies have been extreme fiction and he wanted to change by doing something that was based on true events.  He originally got the idea by watching a documentary about this murder case, which occurred in his hometown over a dozen years ago. In making this film, he went back to watch Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” and relied heavily on it for making “Oh, Mercy!”.  Roubaix, a rough neighborhood in northern France, is where his parents still live; he used visiting his parents as a ruse in order to research this picture.