L'Affaire Le Roux, or more vulgarly, the Le Roux Affair, is a real court case involving a young heiress on the French Riviera whose body never turned up, whose inheritance was absorbed by her lawyer lover who didn't love her, and whose mother ran a sumptuous casino the Mafia wrangled from her grasp with the aid of said lawyer. It's a case that is still working its way through the courts today, 28 years after the young heiress vanished. Director Andre Techine has made an intimate melodrama of the sensational facts, starring Catherine Deneuve in a stunning performance as Maman. In the Name of My Daughter opens May 22, at Opera Plaza Cinemas.
The original French title, L'homme qu'on aimait trop, or The Man One Loved Too Much, is a saucy wink towards real-life sleazy lawyer Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), who skillfully played mother off daughter and vice versa in a series of high-stakes switchbacks no judge or jury could ever satisfactorily wrap its judicial head around. American viewers might feel similarly challenged by the fast-paced intrigue of the film's first 90 minutes, since we don't know the backstory and must field subtitles and worry about Deneuve's Botox use, even as we relish drop-dead views of la Corniche, the Bay of Angels, and the legendary Palais de la Mediterranee in Nice.
The American title, In the Name of my Daughter, suggests U.S. distributors reckoned this mother-daughter-lawyer triangle would be received as "a woman's picture." No one, except possibly women, enjoys women's pictures. Variety 's review complains that viewers are denied the spectacle of grande dame Renee Le Roux being whacked on the head by a thug, being forced instead to submit to a restrained retelling of the incident by Deneuve at a swanky press conference in her casino. It seems your typical American male turns petulant when an ounce of violence is denied him. All I can say is, thank God for the French.
Of the film's 116-minute run time, the first 90 minutes make a splendid neo-noir built on a classic triangle, like something out of Liaisons Dangereuses. The mother and the lawyer both have hard heads, the daughter is the weak link. When the lawyer tries to push Maman around, she shoves him back in his place. Suddenly the daughter's unresolved Electra complex, her past-due-date adolescent rebellion, makes her vulnerable to the lawyer's machinations. The intrigue is spell-binding. Then Agnes disappears. No more triangle. Instead of ending the film here, Techine wanders into the vagaries of a still-unresolved legal battle and the camp value of facial prosthetics and wigs. Bad idea.
In the Name of my Daughter, a terrible title, is based on the mother's memoir, A Woman Against the Mafia, but Techine, who co-wrote the script, gives as much or more screen-time to the daughter. Adele Haenel plays the tragic Agnes as a slapdash, brooding, needy, watery-green-eyed tomboy-cum-siren whose bourgeois bubble has ill-equipped her to deal with an arriviste rat like Agnelet. We watch her swim, like Alice swims in her own tears, while Maurice bides his time on the sand, and never was there a more astute rendering of the battle of the genders, or the Romantic vs. the Mercenary, or the spoiled hippie child vs. the sociopath. Agnes reminded me of François Truffaut's Adele H., memorably played by Isabel Adjani as a woman shamelessly in love, who similarly loses first her self-respect and then her reason. That 1975 film, also based on real life, came two years before the 1977 disappearance of Agnes. Interesting that an actress named Adele H. should incarnate Agnes Le Roux.
Catherine Deneuve is, of course, well worth the price of admission, as a platinum blonde businesswoman on the Cote d'Azur. It's a different country down there, a stone's throw from Monaco, where the big criminals have their empty apartments, and it's a short hop by motorbike to a Swiss bank, as the film splendidly demonstrates. Deneuve's beauty isn't right for the character, and it's a distraction, but a fascinating one so who cares, and it does work to establish the daughter's hatred of the mother, who is visibly everything she is not. I was regretting the fillers in her cheeks and rooting for her muscles' ability to still deliver real human expressions. The muscles did pretty well. The eyes do the rest.