by Brendan Foley
From the opening frames of The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, a French thriller new on VOD, DVD, and Blu-ray from Magnolia, a game is being played. We see a young woman, dazed and dirtied, reverently approach the sea, only to halt and begin doing a strange, euphoric dance. Director Joann Sfar then fades to an earlier time, a time when the young woman was a nervous, mousy office assistant with glasses and tightly bound hair. These scenes of bland melancholy are interspersed with split screens featuring a dead man, discolored and bloodied corpse oblivious to the nattering of the office drones.
The girl, we learn, is Dany (Freya Mavor), a shy young woman who has never even seen the sea, despite living only a few days’ drive from the shore. Dany nurses a crush on her boss (Benjamin Biolay) with whom she shared a one-night stand several years ago before he chucked her for one of her co-workers (Stacy Martin). Fully aware of her affections, the prick goads Dany into using her vacation time to go to his house to do some extensive extra work. And after she’s finished, he asks her to drive him and his family to the airport in his bitching new Thunderbird, then return the car to Paris.
Instead, Dany impulsively opts to take the car (a car which Sfar shoots like sex on four wheels, the most erotically-charged item in a film that drips sensuality in most every frame) and drive to the beach. What should be a short drive becomes a bizarre odyssey as Dany is stalked and attacked by a mysterious figure, followed by unscrupulous men, and, most troubling of all, routinely running into people who claim to have met and interacted with her the day before she arrived.
What’s going on here? Is this a Fight Club type-deal where Dany’s having a mental break? She’s known to talk to herself and no one else seems to notice the crazy shit that befalls her. Is this a Donnie Darko type-deal where time is circling in on itself?
Sfar proves so adept at crafting a mood of menace that it’s almost a shame that the film has to, at a certain point, come to a firm and conclusive answer about what is going on. In that way, The Lady recalls the sort of thrillers that Mario Bava would craft in the 60s and 70s, films like The Girl Who Knew Too Much (aka The Evil Eye) or Hatchet for the Honeymoon. These aren’t ‘horror’ films per se, but the emphasis is placed on crafting an all-consuming mood that allows the possibility, even appearance, of metaphysical elements in films otherwise set in the ‘real’ world (you could also include the early giallo films of Dario Argento in that category, films like Deep Red, although those are far closer to pure horror than what Bava was getting up to. Bava would eventually do a pure giallo film [Twitch of the Death Nerve, which got a bunch of other titles in international release, none of them even one-tenth as badass as Twitch of the Death Nerve. Say that shit out loud and marvel at how any assemblage of words could be so badass. TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE. Anywho, that film saw Bava take the murder-mystery format that Argento had so popularized and blew it up into Loony Tunes bloodsport. Bava dropped the mic so damn hard, the Friday the 13th movies were still finding new ways to rip him off fully over a decade later).
The Lady more closely recalls The Girl. Just like that film, the movie builds to a fever pitch of nonsensical insanity and then has to hit the brakes and lay out exactly what has happened and why it happened and all that ‘plot’ stuff that is so much less fun. I can imagine a certain subsection of viewer coming away from the film irritated with how linear and straight-forward the resolution proves to be.
For all that the ending is an inevitable sort of shrug, getting there is quite a bit of fun. Mavor is doing that Not Another Teen Movie shit of “Incredibly attractive woman wears glasses and we’re supposed to accept her as a mousy shut-in” thing, but she has an interesting, nervous screen presence that keeps you on edge even during the early scenes when nothing threatening or off-putting is happening. Her Dany seems constantly on the edge of snapping completely, her drive (double-meaning!) to the sea more and more seeming a manic and irrational obsession. You want to believe Dany is a victim in all this and that she will find her way clear, but there’s no guarantee of such an outcome. Mavor is of Scottish nativity, raised in England, so that nervousness may be down to genuine confusion over what she’s supposed to be doing, but it works very well for the role.
The rest of the cast has been directed to play scenes as affectless as possible, adding to the eerie and off-putting atmosphere that pervades the film. Something is WRONG, something is fundamentally broken in this world (see also: the corpse that Sfar keeps fading to, a lingering pestilence beneath every sunny day) and Sfar does an admirable job of putting you in the confused headspace of Dany as she tries to figure out how she got into this Moebius strip of death and how she might extract herself.
Sfar got his start in comics before moving into adaptations of his own graphic novels and comics, including the live action Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life and the animated The Rabbi’s Cat. He also contributed a segment to that Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet movie. The Lady makes good use of those animator/illustrator skills, using stylized colors and impressionistic framing to maintain the unreality of Dany’s waking nightmare. And Sfar positively basks in the period details (the film is set in the late 60s/early 70s, and if they specified the exact year I missed it), his lens drinking up the bold colors of the cars and fashions that marked that era.
The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun is a damn fun time at the movies, brimming with a pleasing menace for the full runtime. If the climax is a little limp, that only slightly undermines what is otherwise an energetic exercise in tightly-wound tension.