PARIS PREMIERE – SUNDAY 1IS SEPTEMBER AT 11:20 PM – FILM
Angel’s voice, virgin’s eyes, fairy fingers, she is a beautiful blonde to whom one would give the good Lord without confession. But this Lucretia (Mélanie Laurent) is not so virtuous: she executes men in cold blood.
Lucrezia is a trained singer and a hired killer. She works for the most expensive crime executor on the market. As she prepares to hang up her job to devote herself to her daughter, she is forced to accept one last mission.
It involves posing as an opera singer at a private concert in a Swiss castle, and assassinating one of her partners, a British baritone (Christopher Stills) who, in addition to his musical performances, runs a whisky business. The distillery he has just bought in Scotland is hampering the construction of a pipeline that is supposed to bring in a lot of money for British Oil.
While Lucrezia is working on her plan, French counter-espionage, informed of the contract, sends an elite agent, a little grumpy (Clovis Cornillac), but very motivated to infiltrate the orchestra and unmask the person whose baritone is the target, with the help of the lord of the manor who has been informed.
Rain of twists and turns
We saw in the prelude with what cold blood the killer carries out her missions. It was a question of making a man swallow a poisoned host during a mass where he was not the only one to take communion. This time, it is during the rehearsals of the Messiahby Handel, that it is a question of acting and, as a solid admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, Jérôme Le Gris does not fail to remind us of the musical virtue of suspense in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
Other winks are scattered throughout this ironic thriller where the viewer is one step ahead of the characters: false suspects, heroine in the shower, lemons swallowed like glasses of milk. The music is stormy like a Bernard Herrmann score, the twists and turns rain down…
What Jérôme Le Gris tells us seems like déjà vu: last mission before redemption, closed-door… It resembles Agatha Christie, with a secret service agent coming to snoop around to stop the crime in time, Clovis Cornillac’s sullen Hercule Poirot. The director is having fun with a universe that Alfred Hitchcock mastered. And the viewer is invited to detect winks and references.
Requiem for a Slayer can therefore be seen as a conventional thriller, a laborious alignment of episodes worthy of a train station soap opera (first degree), or as a brilliant and ironic exercise in style playing with clichés with delicious mastery (second degree).
Apart from an unnecessarily explanatory ending, we will opt for the second hypothesis.
Requiem for a Slayerby Jérôme Le Gris (Fr., 2011, 91 minutes) With Mélanie Laurent, Clovis Cornillac, Tchéky Karyo, Michel Fau. Paris Première
