Al is about to win the Lottery. Or the equivalent of it. In 10 days time he will be promoted to General Manager of car dealership in a Parisian suburb where he started out as a lowly mechanic years ago, and he will be given a 25% stake in the business, and he gets to marry the Boss’s daughter too. Things are going swimmingly for him until the early hours of one morning when he is driving home rather too fast after a night of celebrating and he runs over a pedestrian who gets hit badly. His friends persuade him to jump back in the car quickly and drive off before they are caught, but unbeknown to them the whole accident has been witnessed. Juliette has seen it all from her apartment balcony and its she who calls for the ambulance and police. She is still in shock when questioned but anyway wasn’t close enough to get too much detail of the car and driver to help the Police a great deal. She does however persuade her boyfriend to take her to the hospital next day to visit the victim in intensive care and discovers that he is an illegal immigrant with false papers. As the Authorities seem to care little about establishing the man’s true identity, Juliette decides to do this herself and manages to track down Vera his Moldavian wife who also has no legal status in France.
A distraught Vera is quick to seize on Juliette as a friend and a support, and on one of the occasions they are are visiting the hospital together, Juliette is convinced that the young man seen leaving the ICU could in fact be the hit and run driver. Her assumptions are correct as since the incident Al has been racked with guilt and is desperate to discover the condition of the victim.
The drama gets worse when the poor man dies and leaves his widow with a large unpaid hospital and an unsolved crime. Vera takes it upon herself to recruit her brothers in law to hunt the driver down to get some revenge and extract some blood money too to pay her mounting debts.
Meanwhile Juliette has kept it quiet that not only has she located Al, but she has confronted him with the realities of the situation. Somewhere along the line this do-gooder of a student falls for Al who by now is so beset on making good that he is exploiting ways of robbing his wealthy future father-in-law to repay Vera and has even lost all desire to even get married now in a few days time. He seeks solace in Juliette and in a moment of weakness, she succumbs. From here it all spirals out of control and Al gets found out by everybody, and the only time his luck holds out is when the brothers-in-law get disturbed when they are about to pummel him to death.
It’s a strange melodramatic story that at times seems to get lost in too much detail, although very wisely at the end it redeems itself totally when things are left untied and we are left wondering. It’s a very classy thriller which, as indicated by th title, crosses over three different worlds: Al’s blue-collar roots, Juliette’s middle-class well-meaning bourgeois, and Vera’s undocumented underbelly of society. Directed and co-written by filmmaker Catherine Corsini, but it is not nearly in the same class as her 2009 superb movie ‘Leaving’ starring Kristin Scott Thomas. There are strong performances from Raphaël Personnaz as the frenetic Al whose world is coming apart, and from Clotilde Hesme as Juliette who tried to please everyone and in doing so pleased no-one.
P.S. Even though Al ended up winning nothing, he was still left with that stunning face of his. Shallow? I know! But I defy anyone not to go weak at the knees at the sight of him in the final frame.
★★★★★★★
