WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Miramax Films/Zoe Director: Dominik Moll Writer: Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand Cast: Laurent Lucas, Sergi Lopez, Mathilde Seigner, Sophie Guillemin
When someone I know comes back from a vacation, I feel duty-bound to ask the obvious question: "How was it?" Don't you? How many times did you get the reply, "Just awful...I can't wait to get back to work." I don't think I ever did. More likely: "Great...fabulous...it was beautiful...coulda stayed another month." We all know, though, that holidays away from home can be hell one earth. Enforced togetherness. Screaming kids. Hot cars. Delayed flights. "I don't have your reservation and we're full up, sir." Rain every day. In Dominik Moll's scary Hitchcockian thriller "With a friend like Harry..." we meet a couple who didn't need any help from Harry to have a perfectly miserable time. The picture opens on Michel Laurent Lucas), on his way by car with wife and kids to visit his parents and to fix up his summer home. The smallest of the three daughters is crying all the way because of the heat, the middle kid had a lollipop that fell on the floor and she screams for another, and a third demands loudly to take a ride on a swing. Michel's wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner) is overly warm and frustrated while Michel, faced by the taunts and shrieks of four women, is probably thinking he'd rather be back in Paris at his job teaching French to Japanese residents.
Just when things seem unable to worsen, Michel meets Harry (Sergi Lopez) in the men's room of a service station. He doesn't recognize the man as having been in Michel's high-school class, but the 34-year-old Harry, who is travleing with his bimbo girl friend Plum (Sophie Guillemin), not only recalls Michel but can even recite his classmate's poem which was printed in the school literary magazine. Harry's a charmer, all right, but Michel--like us in the audience- senses something's not quite right about him. From the earliest moment, just before Harry re-introduces himself to Michel as both are washing their hands, he stands silently before him for half a minute or so with a sinister grin on his face.
In Dominik Moll's two-hour long thriller, one which almost veers into the territory of slasher movies but wisely remains rooted in some malevolent reality, Michel and his wife Claire at first welcome the new company, particularly when Harry offers to drive them to their dilapidated summer place in his new air-conditioned Mercedes. But when the super-rich, carefree title character--who is single, no kids, and no need to work--buys Michel and Claire a new sports utility vehicle--they are both astounded and becoming mighty suspicious.
They say that serial killer Ted Bundy got his many female victims to trust him by being as charming as a fairy-tale prince--not exactly a psycho of the Hannibal Lecter variety but rather one who had his feet seemingly planted on the earth but his infirm mind in some hellish place known only to him. If you want to know about Bundy, you can read the newspaper articles about him, but if you want to get emotionally in touch with the type of sicko he was, see "With a Friend Like Harry." Moll has given us a black comedy with superior performances from the entire ensemble, which features Sophie Guillemin as the pleasure-loving girl friend who is at first admired by all but later considered a pea- brained cow by the host. Sergi Lopez, known to cineastes for his role in the sometimes puzzling "An Affair of Love," plays the role like a fairly normal, albeit incredibly generous, guest, until gradually he goes off the deep end--the logical extension of his philosophy that "if you don't like something [a car, a parent, a girl friend, a screaming kid], simply get rid of it."
Not that the eerie, suspenseful movie really requires it, but David Sinclair Whitaker's music takes us appropriately from the nicely-nicely portion of Harry's behavior into a steadily more sinister beat, with the picture several times invoking the voice of Dolores del Rio in her authentic version of "Ramona." Matthieu Poirot-Delpech's camera raises the excitement ante regularly as Harry's Mercedes and later his SUV speed along a dark, backwater road while Dominik Moll's direction puts us into the mind of the burned out parents with no moment to themselves and the psycho millionaire who has all too much time on his hands.
Not Rated. Running time: 117 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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