Anything for Her (15)

Alison Rowat's Review

French cinema’s love affair with Hitchcock shows no sign of letting up if this entertaining if overblown thriller from Fred Cavaye is any guide.

While clearly aiming to emulate Tell No One as a sleeper hit, it lacks the subtlety of that picture, though that’s more the fault of the melodramatic story than the performances of leading couple Vincent Lindon and Diane Kruger.

Former model Kruger and French cinema regular Lindon are Julien and Lisa, a professor and his wife. Their seemingly perfect world disintegrates one morning when the police arrive to arrest Lisa for the murder of her boss.

With the attempts of her husband and legal team to prove her innocence coming to nothing, and an increasingly desperate Lisa wasting away in jail, Julien decides on a course of drastic action.

Written and directed by Cavaye, Anything for Her starts off gently enough as a tale of the uncaring state versus the helpless individual, before becoming as over the top as Piaf in full flow.

An intrusive score, complete with Phil Collins style drums at particularly dramatic moments, doesn’t help. Despite the best efforts of the make up and wardrobe teams to make her dowdy and wan, Kruger still looks every inch the sculpted beauty. Fortunately for a picture that often teeters on the edge of credibility, her acting skills are just as impressive.

Paul Greenwood's Review

In the arresting opening to the new French thriller, Anything For Her, a man with blood on his hands drives a car at high speed, while in the back seat an unseen person languishes.

The tone is set for an effective and slippery yarn centering on Julien (Vincent Lindon) and Lisa (Diane Kruger), a couple passionately in love.

Their world is shattered without warning when, to their astonishment, Lisa is arrested for the murder of her boss. Three years later, with the cost of trying to prove her innocence spiralling, Julien comes to believe that the only way to help Lisa is to break her out of jail.

But what lengths will he be prepared to go to? Anything For Her is part domestic drama, part prison break, and maintains the tension well as its twisted morality takes Julien deeper and deeper, asking him to cross more and more lines for Lisa.

An economical script that leaves the audience to fill in a lot of gaps is an asset, but the more the film reveals itself, the less interesting it becomes, until it all becomes a touch overwrought in its latter stages.