WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY
Directed by Dominik Moll With Sergi Lopez, Laurent Lucas Jean Cocteau R 117 min.
A chance meeting during a trip brings together two men, a gregarious extrovert and a cautious introvert, in a bizarre relationship that could have deadly repercussions. It's the armature for Alfred Hitchcock's classic Strangers on a Train, and here it's taken up by German-French writer-director Dominik Moll, and given a fascinating and wholly original treatment with a vaguely paranormal twist.
Michel (Laurent Lucas) is a man caught in the web of middle-class struggle. He has a wife (Mathilde Seigner) and three little girls, a job with a modest income, a tumbledown fixer-upper of a vacation home, and meddlesome elderly parents. En route to his country house, with the car sweltering and the kids whining, he runs into an old school friend (Sergi Lopez) in the bathroom of a highway rest stop.
Or at least the guys says he's an old friend. "Harry - class of '79," he says, thrusting out a glad hand. Michel shrugs helplessly. "I'm sorry.."
But Harry is not offended, and soon with his sloe-eyed and ripely sensuous fiancE9e Plum (Sophie Guillemin) he has insinuated himself as = a houseguest into Michel's life. At dinner he regales his bemused hosts with a reverential recitation of a poem Michel published in their high school magazine 20 years earlier. "Are you still writing?" Harry asks. Michel shakes his head. He no longer has time for that sort of thing...
Who the devil is this Harry? He's wealthy beyond the point of caring, he's free as a bird, he has an adoring girlfriend who, he explains, isn't the brightest bulb in the lamp but has "an animal intelligence" and is a perfect bedmate. And he only wants to help (the French title translates more closely as "Harry, A Friend Who Wishes You Well.") Money is no object. Nor, it gradually appears, is morality.
"His motto is 'For every problem there's a solution,'" Plum tells Michel and his wife. They might not be the solutions you or I, or Michel, would fix upon, but they have a certain pragmatic directness. He seems to have a residual hero-worship of Michel from their high school days, when he dated Michel's leftover girlfriend and memorized everything he wrote. That Michel was a sort of ideal for him; and now, when he sees cares and responsibilities weighing his old friend down and keeping him from pursuing his youthful talents, it makes Harry mad.
With a Friend Like Harry is a gem of a psychological thriller, with a terrific cast. Lopez won France's Best Actor Cesar for his creepily ingratiating Harry. Moll's story, with its humor and its ominous suspense (an empty well in the back yard just begs for a body) never lets up.
But the greatest fun of the movie is trying to figure out Harry. Who is he? Is he a real person at all? Is he the dark side of Michel's nature? Is he Satan (one of whose traditional nicknames is Harry)? Is he just a well-meaning psychopath? We can't make him out - that's the trouble with Harry..
But then that's a different Hitchcock movie.
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