Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) (5/10)

January 12th, 2012

A routine whodunit, Nobody Else But You sees our intrepid amateur sleuth hero, a crime-fiction novelist named David Rousseau, investigating the apparent suicide of local bleach-blonde starlet Candice Lecoeur. I say apparent; of course it’s anything but. Parallels with the life and death of another peroxide blonde, a certain Norma Jean Baker, abound.

Damn, it looks cold in the French village of Mouthe. Snow everywhere. And over there, in the woods, underneath some fresh snow, lies the most certainly dead body of Candice Lecoeur, her frozen fingers still clutching a bottle of pills. Open and shut case, say the local police. No investigation, nothing. Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve), who fancies himself as a bit of a sleuth, sees a novel in it.

He breaks into the dead girl’s house. There, in a bureau with the lock broken, are Candice’s personal diaries. All except one: the last one. Find that diary and you’ve got a mighty good chance of finding out what really happened. In the meantime, he retires to the vollage’s only hotel, fends off the young receptionist who sees a bit of out-of-town mystique in his appearance, and reads.

Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton) was a nobody named Martine Langevin before being discovered and put on a local calendar. Willing to please, and now renamed, she posed for more and more revealing photos, becoming quite the district celebrity. Privately, though, she had issues. Her two identities confused her. At home she was Martine, in public she was Candice. She fantasised about reincarnation. Her birthday, June 1st, was the same as Marilyn Monroe’s. She too, you may remember, started off as a calendar girl. You will know other things about Monroe’s life, and writer/director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu wastes no opportunity in comparing the two. Happy birthday, Mr. President.

There’s a fair amount of talent on display in Nobody Else But You, which makes it all the more surprising that the end product is a bit of a damp squib. The story would work well as a novel, I’m sure of it, but the film version tries too hard to inject quirky Coenesque situations in. The Minnesota brothers can do it, and do it well; Hustache-Mathieu cannot. When you look back at Fargo you realise that, whilst the additional characters were memorable in their oddities, they still felt real. I never got that here, whether it was the chancer receptionist, the clearly-gay policeman (Guillaume Gouix, in a hopeless assignment) or the barking police chief (Olivier Rabourdin). The story is sound, there’s no doubt about it, and it offers up an interesting hypothesis about Monroe’s ultimate demise, but there’s a sense of imbalance about the whole endeavour. Nobody Else But You had enough going for it with its mystery and its parallel lives angle; adding tributes to other films and directors detracts and distracts. I spent more time playing ‘name that tribute’ than I did trying to figure out who dun what.