Harry, He Is Here to Help

Synopsis: Michel (Laurent Lucas) and Claire (Mathilde Siegner), a young couple with 3 children have set out for their summer holidays. The heat, the squabbling in the back seat are vexing but when Michel bumps into Harry (Sergi Lopez), an old school chum little does he realize that the Holiday From Hell is about to begin.

The publicity for this film justly compares it to Hitchcock, not that that in my books is necessarily a good thing. The point of resemblance is not so much stylistic as in subject matter and approach - a fascination with a darkly dysfunctional world lying beneath the veneer of the everyday, presented in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek and strongly plot-driven form. Some critics have described it as a black comedy but that is going too far, although there are a couple of chuckles early on. In its early phases it is difficult to tell to what genre it belongs. Whilst initially, Michel and his family appear not dissimilar to the Griswalds on one of their vacations, the rather foreboding score skews this expectation and slowly the mood becomes distinctly sombre and then menacing. In respect of this creeping tension, Dominik Moll's film is reminiscent of George Sluizer's The Vanishing, although not having the same harrowing impact, largely due to the classically reassuring, and once again, very Hitchcockian ending.

Aside from so effectively dragging the unwilling viewer from the innocuously banal to near horror, the great strength of this film is the characterisations. Each character is carefully observed and delineated, creating a compellingly effective weave of interactions. Centre stage here are Michel and Harry, dissimilar in personality and lifestyle yet both emotionally insecure, increasingly caught in a maelstrom of co-dependency. The plot shows little regard for details and indeed it is not clear whether the apparently chance encounter between Michel and Harry was not pre-arranged by the latter (how otherwise could he have known where Michel's parents lived) but in any case Harry assumes the identity of Michel's "evil angel", the manifestation of a repressed voice that is telling him to rebel against society's norms - against propriety, filial piety, marriage, parenthood and so on, the story becoming an extended metaphor for the battle between the individual and the social. In a not particularly satisfying way, co-writer Moll appears to have a bet both ways on the outcome. Therein lies a interesting topic for after-the-film discussion.

Both Laurent Lucas and Sergi Lopez are excellent in the principal roles and are ably supported by the rest of the cast. The director has done a fine job in creating a thriller, albeit one which is more concerned with psychological states than cinematic action.

 

 

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