TrueHello
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
Sameer Callahan
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Kimball
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
paul2001sw-1
'The Page Turner' is a suspenseful thriller, but in a cool, elegant and understated way: a typically French movie. The plot tells of a young musician slighted by a somewhat self-obsessed pianist, who subsequently gets her revenge through subtly undermining the older woman's confidence. The film is quite good at maintaining a foreboding mood, the girl gives nothing away and the viewer is tempted to assume the end may be bloody or contrived; it's slightly disappointing when the resolution, though believable, turns out to be altogether more straightforward. I think I would have liked just a little more twist; but the movie is commendable for its avoidance of pyrotechnics in favour of the mood of growing apprehension it cultivates instead. A cultivated film, indeed.
bob_meg
We've all seen what I like to call the Blank-From-Hell movie many times. You know what I mean. The admin assistant or nanny who looks oh-so-perfect from the outside only to reveal his or herself as a raving psychopath targeting a perfectly innocent, wronged person.Part of the reason these villains tend to have all the shelf-life of a McDonalds straw is the fact that we don't know much about them until the end of the film, and what we do find out is hardly revelatory: they were abused, they were traumatized, nobody loved them. Yeah, yeah...too little too late. You're out of the theater before you can process it.Melanie, played by the willowy, composed Deborah Francois, is hands down the most intriguing "blank" you'll ever meet. She doesn't rave, she doesn't rage incoherently and break everything in sight. Her parents were reasonably supportive of her and she wasn't abused. She's just someone you don't want to mess with.Struggling as a child to achieve her dream of becoming a concert pianist, she suffers a severe setback when a semi-renowned female judge rudely allows an outsider into the performance hall for an autograph during a crucial career-determining audition. Melanie's meticulous performance is destroyed and the judge (Ariane, superbly played by Catherine Frot) shrugs it off without a second thought. But not Melanie.Years later, she has insinuated herself, via an internship at Ariane's husband's law firm, into a live-in position at the family's posh country house, where she easily fills the role of Ariane's page-turner on her upcoming slate of radio broadcasts with her classical trio.We all know the drill by now, right? Since, being a BFH movie, we must have the standard plot points (see "Hand That Rocks the Cradle" or "Orphan" for more details)...pet is killed, husband is seduced, etc, etc."The Page Turner" brilliantly turns up it's nose at these mundane conventions and allows the diabolical machinations to be more emotional than physical. Melanie deftly manipulate's Arianne's fragile emotional state, creating a crippling dependence that's so wonderful to see shatter, when the time becomes right.Even that isn't easy or lazy...Francois' brilliant cypher-like performance never lets us in on what's really going through her mind. Is she regretting her scheme to put every aspect of Ariane's life in complete ruin...or is she gradually falling in love or like with the woman? And if she is, is she doing it to spite and cripple her even more? And is Ariane worthy of your sympathy? In a usual BFH movie that would be cut and dry....here it's anything but.One things's for sure, revenge has never been this bitter or this sweet at the same time.
dromasca
Several comments around this movie used the saying 'revenge is a dish served cold' which seems to resume so well the story. A young girl sees her dream to become a pianist broken when a famous pianist in the jury negligently signs an autograph and distracts her during the admission exam to the music school. Many years later we see her grown up as an anonymous secretary hired to be a nanny and than a page turner to the pianist, in fact devising an elaborate revenge.The thrill and the failure of the movie lie both in the cool and sophisticated building of the revenge, with an expectation of violence that never becomes real. The young assistant brilliantly played by Déborah François - looking here like a kind of a French version of Scarlett Johansson - comes from a socially inferior milieu but one who hints to violence (her father is a butcher). Yet her revenge as much we expect to be violent is mostly psychological, she wins the confidence of the whole family just to break the career of the pianist making her fail at a key audition, and to distort the style and cause pain to her son, also an aspiring piano pupil. The quality of the film can be found in the description o the subtle class differences between the characters and in the intellectual and music filled atmosphere that envelops almost all the duration of the screening. Here lies also however the failure of the film, at least for viewers who did not come to watch a pure art film, who will leave I think as I did, with a feeling of in-satisfaction because as the revenge seems to be too cool and non-balanced relative to the breaking a child's dreams in life. As most of the viewers are in cinema theaters to watch something else than a good camera music concerto, I am afraid that they will share my opinion.
dcfemella
The Page Turner was directed by Denise Dercourt, who won awards for his other film Lise et Andre. It starts off with Melanie, a little girl who has hopes to getting a full scholarship to an esteemed music school by playing piano. She is passionate and it shows in the way that she plays. The audience has no doubts that she will make it in. Her dreams are tarnished when one of the judges, Ariane Fouchecourt, disrupts her concentration by accepting an autograph in the middle of her recital. She never plays piano again. We see her later as a teenager, who is working as an intern for a successful lawyer. The secretary who she works under tells her that the lawyer needs someone to watch his son, so Melanie takes the job. His wife? The judge who made her lose her dreams. In the beginning we are not sure what Melanie's intentions are, but then we soon realize that it is revenge.The movie dragged, and I kept waiting for the pace to pick up. The interaction between the two main characters could have been a little bit emotion than what we are shown. I understand that it was suppose to be an escalating suspense, but I feel that it lacked a climax. If it were a book, I would have already put it down waiting for "AHA" moment. It seems that too many movies are lacking good scenes until the end. Also, many people seem to have short memories, so they ignore how bored they were for the past 95 minutes, and are happy because the ending was good. The movie did have a denouement, and I was happy for that. Another thing that I liked about the film is that it showed that in revenge, the avenger and the avengee have their good and bad points. My parents loved this film, and I can see why. However, it wasn't for me.
