Two superb films this week have more in common than one might think given that one is, ostensibly, a thriller, the other a comedy about bourgeois intellectuals.
Yet Danny Boyle's Trance and François Ozon's In the House are intelligent, stylish, genre-busting films, which play masterful mind games around truth, reality and manipulation, and whose characters' confusion as to who, or what to believe is mirrored by our own.
Boyle is one of the Great Brits of the moment. The director shot Trance while he was preparing to open the Olympics, then edited the film in the glow of the Games' success. You can almost smell the confidence on screen.
James McAvoy isn't doing badly himself. Two weeks after Welcome to the Punch he's back as Simon, an auctioneer who, in a lively opening sequence, talks us through the nuts and bolts of an inside job – he being the insider, as a Goya is stolen in the very moment of its £25 million sale.
Despite the robbery going to plan, there's a hitch: after receiving a crack on the head, Simon can't remember what he's done with the painting.
"Everyone knows amnesia is b*****ks," declares one of his accomplices. But gang leader Frank (Vincent Cassel), an intelligent hood, suggests Simon visit a hypnotherapist, Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), in the hope that she can lure the information out of him.
As Elizabeth demands equal status with the gang we feel we're in familiar territory, a heist movie with the trappings of film noir – the damaged hero, the charismatic villain, the femme fatale. But as she gets to work on Simon's mind, the film jumps down the rabbit hole.
Did Simon attempt to con his partners? Was that recognition on Elizabeth's face when he first walks through her door? Given her skill set, what's to say she isn't manipulating Simon, Frank and his crew without their knowing it? How to tell the difference between what's forgotten, what's a secret and what's a con?
As ever, Boyle's trademark pace and panache serve the plot, not his ego, and as the director whirls into one twist after another proceedings take on a persuasively nightmarish hue. He's well served by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (London is looking particularly good on screen right now) and writers Joe Ahearne and John Hodge, the latter so integral, of course, to Trainspotting and Shallow Grave.
McAvoy and Cassel are typically adept with characters who are far from black and white; the surprise is Dawson, best known for the cartoonish Sin City and shining in a real role, as the woman who may – or may not – be pulling their strings.
In the House stars Fabrice Luchini as Germain, a disenchanted teacher at a French school who is pleasantly surprised when 16-year-old Claude hands in his latest writing assignment. Finally Germain has a star pupil; but one that he may come to regret.
The self-possessed boy admits that he has ingratiated himself into the home of a classmate, plundering the family's foibles for material, while thinking of seducing his friend's mother. Though disapproving of the exploitation, Germain offers the lad personal tutoring, advising Claude not only on his writing but on his ongoing relations in the house.
It's difficult to know whether the reality of the family is driving Claude's story, or the other way around; moreover, it seems that Germain and his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose conceptual art gallery has her labelled as a pornographer by the locals, are being drawn themselves into the youngster's story.
It's a dazzling concoction, comic and mysterious, beautifully played and orchestrated with great virtuosity by Ozon.
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