French director Julien Leclercq, who also co-scripted this film set in 'the near future', has produced a marvel of style and menace in this tale riddled with ambiguities. There are identical twins, people who switch identities, people who forget entirely who they are, others who remember being someone else, and general questions of identity. The film is a tease, and is extremely thought-provoking. The colour film stock has been flashed, so that it is very faded, and the scenes have then been tinted blue by shooting through a blue lens, which sometimes is removed when focusing on the people. In fact, there seem to be several tones and shades, and whether this was done while shooting or in the film processing I do not know. At times, it is nearly 'blanc et noir', as the French call black and white, or should I say 'bleu et noir'. The art direction is superb. Some of the acting is intentionally stylized, with the secret villains remaining aloof, calculating, and showing hypocritical and unconvincing warmth to the people they are manipulating in the story. The Bulgarian villain is convincingly psychopathic, and really, he is the best example I have seen why Bulgarians should be restricted in their right to travel within the EU. We just don't want to run into him, or his brother! There are some grisly but mind-boggling scenes of intense individual combat and martial arts at close quarters in confined spaces here, and I cannot imagine how many weeks or months it must have taken to rehearse all those moves. The film has some deeply disturbing aspects of technological innovation as applied to human mind manipulation, and there are numerous stressful scenes which sensitive souls would do well not to watch. If you have a low stress level, do not buy this DVD, as you really will not be able to sleep afterwards. But for those who can tough it out, it is well worth watching, and studying carefully. Leclercq is above all a master stylist, and perhaps he should be a designer. There are several excellent performances in this film, and it does not matter that the dialogue is rudimentary, for the silences and ambiguities are all the more effective as a result of the lack of verbal exposition. As is usual in all modern French thrillers, a sense of deep paranoia about the French state pervades the tale, and the security services are the ultimate villains. And now that the French state is run by what they call 'the Bermuda Triangle' (Hollande and his two feuding women), the fact that people disappear and re-emerge, memories vanish into black holes and are then summoned forth again, seems part of the surreal political landscape of today, as if it had been anticipated by Leclercq in 2007, and premonitorily evoked. Instead of the women and girls being called Manon and Clemence as in this film, one expects them to be called Segolène and Valérie. Or would that be too much for the nerves to bear? And at the controls of the new technology in this film is the eerie Marthe Keller, who plays a German immigrant to France, thus reminding us of 1940 and all those charming Germans who came to France at that time, with similar intentions to make people disappear. The warnings about mind control implicit in this film should be taken seriously. Mind control projects have been going on for half a century or more, and they only get worse, so watch and learn.
Review of Chrysalis
