Farce played as a thriller, The Origin of Evil (L’Origine du Mal) stars the brilliant Laure Calamy. If you enjoyed her style of paranoid ditziness in the worldwide TV hit Call My Agent (Dix Pour Cent), there’s plenty more of the same on offer here.
She plays Nathalie, an ex-jailbird who decides that while her lover, Stéphane (Suzanne Clément), is in jail on a five-year stretch she’ll impersonate her and introduce herself to the father Stéphane never knew.
For why? This is not exactly clear – she hoping to get some money out of him, maybe, or it’s just the latest of her scams, or she’s after a family she can call her own even if it’s someone else’s. Whichever it is, she gets more than she bargained for after getting in touch and arranging to meet “her father” for the first time. It turns out Serge (Jacques Weber) is very wealthy indeed and lives on an island off the Côte d’Azur. He’s also recently had a stroke and as he enters the last phase of his life his family are beginning to wheel around him hoping to cash in before he cashes out.
Into this hornet’s nest steps Nathalie posing as Stéphane, overwhelmed at first by the lifestyle on display, she does her best to fight against the arctic response she gets from Serge’s batty wife Louise (Dominique Blanc), aloof daughter George (Doria Tillier), only moderately warmer niece Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell – an obvious face of the future) and bulldog-loyal factotum Agnès (Véronique Ruggia). It partially works. Serge likes this new daughter he has never met, but the rest of the family wish she would drop dead, at least at first.
Periodically Nathalie gets phone calls from the real Stéphane (Suzanne Clément) and even visits her in jail for conjugal R and R, without ever letting on what she’s up to in the outside world. What with the real Stéphane being a bit of a hothead, the reticence is understandable.
Also – Nathalie has fallen for the lifestyle of her new family, possibly to an extent that makes the real Stéphane, who she loves dearly, a bit of a problem.
The who, the what and the where of farce all established, a number of inspired developments take the story from here along a serpentine route, forcing Nathalie to shift tactically as she goes, thinking on her feet the entire time, brazening it out with the family even when it seems they have caught her out in her lie.
No one is really who they say they are in this movie, and new character wrinkles are revealed as regularly as a new twist in the tale. Serge may not be the twinkling old patriarch he at first appears. Wife Louise isn’t half as batty as she’s pretending. Wily George may be on to Nathalie but maybe she’s got chicanery of her own in mind. Only Jeanne is halfway normal.
As things go on, director Sébastien Marnier increasingly reaches for the gothic, with events and consequences piling up like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley as rewritten by Wilkie Collins. The ensemble country-house element gives it a hint of Agatha Christie, the sumptuously mad production design of of Damien Rondeau and swinging crane shots of DP Romain Carcanade a belt of Hitchcock glam, while the music, by the duo Philippe Brault and Pierre Lapointe, shifts from a series of experimental-style bangs, groans and throbs towards jingle-jangle old school camp – is that a harpsichord?
It is vastly entertaining. Only slight quibble is the neglect of Suzanne Clément, as the real Stéphane. She’s a phenomenon, and if you’ve seen Xavier Dolan’s Mommy you’ll probably be frustrated too. Why get in a French Canadian only to underuse her? The slight answer is, ironically, money: this is a French/French Canadian co-production.
Fair enough, it isn’t her film. It’s Calamy’s, and she’s superb as the superficially cocky, permanently vigilant hero/villain we are rooting for throughout, even when she’s killing someone.
The Origin of Evil – watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
