Pour Elle aka Anything For Her

Pour Elle aka Anything for Her

Starring: Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger, Lancelot Roch, Olivier Marchal, Hammou Graïa

Directed by: Fred Cavayé

Reviewed by: Conor Flynn







‘Anything for her’ is French thriller which racks up tension from the word go. The credits begin on black and we hear someone crying in agony. The scene cuts to a driver inside a car, covered in blood. This is Julien (Lindon) and he's on the run from something. The agonised sounds are not coming from him, but from someone else in the car off-screen. What automatically comes to mind is a scene in the film ‘Reservoir dogs’ in which two criminals escape a botched bank robbery, but even from the beginning, it is obvious that Julien is a man completely out of his depth. Cut to three years earlier…

Here we begin to learn about his background as a school teacher, with a loving wife, Lisa (Kruger), and their son Oscar. Suddenly their family life is thrown into turmoil when the police raid their apartment and arrest Lisa. She is soon convicted of murdering someone and given a prison sentence of twenty years minimum. Now Julien is determined to set his wife free (intense pause) no matter the cost.

The whodunit element of the film is jettisoned almost immediately when we discover who the actual murderer is. Thankfully the audience isn’t cheated with a twist ending which contradicts this moment, instead the film travels down a far more original and thought provoking route. As stated at the beginning of this review, the film is tense, and, for the most part, it never lets up. This mostly is due to a convincing performance by Vincent Lindon; if his performance was bad the rest of the film would simply fall apart.

In certain ways it reminds this reviewer of the Spanish thriller 'Intacto' as it suffers from similar problems. The film is highly contrived and requires a suspension of disbelief and then some. Another problem, though most will overlook it, are quite a few instances of deus ex machina, particularly towards the end of the film, in which a dastardly computer is on the verge of scuppering our anti-hero’s mission at the last hurdle. But the thing is; you won’t care, the film is solid entertainment though-out. Despite the extremely dubious moral implications of Julien’s decisions, you want him to succeed, even if it is with ‘out of the blue’ interventions.

‘Anything for her’ is a trashy Euro thriller posing as art-house cinema; it’s inane beyond belief, but extremely entertaining. It can only be a matter of time before Hollywood gets round to remaking this one.