"D'après une histoire vraie" or "Based on a True Story" is a new French-language movie and the most recent work by controversial Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski and he was joined by another fairly famous French filmmaker Olivier Assayas here in adapting the novel into the script that makes the movie. Like Polanski's previous work, it is basically a two-man piece and the man's wife Emmanuelle Seigner is joined by Eva Green this time. it is the story of a successful yet mentally struggling writer whose life spirals into destruction with the appearance of a woman who's far more mysterious than she seems to be initially. And this woman is played by Green and I agree with the other writer who says that green is basically almost the only shining light in these 100 minutes. But she is good enough (and attractive enough, wow) to really allow me to be generous eventually and give this a positive recommendation. Seigner is okay I guess, but the story is really nothing special, hardly offers anything new and the plot feels like something that was done many times already and not worse most of these times. Oh yeah, I have not read the book it is based on, so don't know the base material is the problem or the adaptation. The attention to detail is weak at times, otherwise tolerable. I liked the moment with the identical shoes for example. The very last show with Seigner's character looking like Green at the signing again was underwhelming and looked like a desperate attempt to make the film seem smarter than it was. The stair falling scene was also not too great, felt really for the sake of it, same about all the scenes with Vincent Perez whose character could have been left out entirely. And a shame to see Dominique Pinon wasted like this in a one-scene performance. I am still undecided about the film from the realistic performance, for example about the dinner scene where it became quickly clear to the audience that nobody else would be coming. The idea that the two would look alike enough to be taken for one another is as absurd as it gets, but actually thinking about this in depth lets me think that it really only was included to show how Seigner's character believed everything at that point already that Green's was saying. This also works well together with the absurd idea that she would be a ghost writer for Depardieu and she believes that as well. One thing that certainly did not work out was the way Seigner's character's health and energy rise into unknown dimensions all of a sudden out of nowhere right after the broken kneecap and how she thinks she will trick the other woman all of a sudden while being hopeless and powerless before all the time. Very bizarre. Did not make sense at all to me. As for the several references to people people around Green's character dying in strange accidents, maybe it would have been a better choice to have her kill Seigner's character eventually. Show her fall in the pit, then move away the way Polanski did into the future and show her dead with a gunshot wound or something. This could have been better, but yeah he had to stay close to the book I guess. And finally, this is of course not a film with real suspense. We know from the very first moment Green enters the picture and shines magnificently that she is no good. All, in a huge thumbs-up for green, a minor thumbs-down for everything else. An okay watch if you like Polanski, the actors and the genre, but nowhere near must-see territory, probably not even among the very best French films from 2017. See it if you find nothing better.
Review of Based on a True Story
