Film Review: French mob story chases emotional truth
French director Andre Techine has been making films for 40 years, rarely getting as much attention in the U.S. as many lesser contemporaries. He had something of a commercial breakthrough here — by foreign film standards, at least — with “Wild Reeds” (released here in 1995), ironically one of his least star-powered features. It was followed by a string of his best work — “Thieves” (1996), “Alice and Martin” (1998), “Strayed” (2003) and “The Girl on the Train” (2009).
He’s worked multiple times with the most exportable of French stars, including Juliette Binoche, Gerard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and, most of all, Catherine Deneuve. The new “In the Name of My Daughter” is his seventh collaboration with this queen of French cinema.
The film is based on a real-life case — the disappearance of casino heiress Agnes Le Roux (Adele Haenel), whose mother, Renee (Deneuve), is fighting to maintain control of the family business. A mob boss (Jean Corso) is conspiring to force the sale of the casino and monopolize gambling in the south of France. Renee has hired Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet, best known in the U.S. for directing the 2006 thriller “Tell No One”), a mediocre lawyer but a brilliant and devious deal broker.
Apparently, every woman within 50 miles knows that Agnelet is a romantic cad, with a wife, kids and multiple mistresses — which doesn’t seem to handicap his caddishness a bit. The film never clarifies whether he’s dallied with his boss, but in any case she is less than happy when he takes up with her daughter, newly returned from abroad. Mother and daughter bicker all the time, but Mom is genuinely gobsmacked when Agnelet convinces Agnes — who, like Mom, is one of the principal stockholders in the casino — to vote for the other side.
As the strained seams in the Agnes/Agnelet romance begin to tear, Agnes suddenly disappears; and her half of the money she and Agnelet received from the deal miraculously turns up in Agnelet’s account. Even though Agnelet is absolved in the initial criminal procedure, Renee pursues him legally for another 30 years. In fact, as of early 2014, after Techine had finished shooting the film, Renee, now in her 90s, was still on the case; and Agnelet was being retried for the umpteenth time. (In the film’s final quarter, Canet’s usually handsome face is encumbered with some of the worst old-age makeup I’ve ever seen.)
Techine took much greater liberties when he fictionalized a real-life case a few years back in “The Girl on the Train.” With “In the Name of My Daughter,” he uses the real names of still-living people who are endlessly involved in legal struggles with each other. Inevitably he changes the timeline and omits certain tangential characters in order to bolster the dramatic structure.
Nonetheless, at times the back story to Agnes’ vanishing is still a little too complicated for non-Gallic types to follow. Techine clearly made this with domestic audiences in mind — people who had been inundated with details by the popular news media in 1977 and again every few years, whenever Agnelet would be tried again.
Techine wants to honor the general truth, even as he abandons many details, but his main concern is emotional, not historical. As anyone who has seen a few of his earlier films would expect, it is the intense relationship of mother and daughter that interests him — a mother who is terribly betrayed by her daughter and yet spends the rest of her life trying to avenge her.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).