Delightful French films, part 2: The Crime Is Mine

Pauline (Rebecca Marder) and Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) in François Ozon's The Crime is Mine. Image source: RMITV.org

What if pleading guilty to a murder solved all your problems?

In The Crime is Mine (Mon crime, 2023), it's the mid-1930s, jobs in Paris are hard to come by, and everything is going wrong for Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Pauline (Rebecca Marder). Madeleine is a young actress still waiting for her big break, and Pauline passed the Bar a year ago but is yet to score a client. The roommates owe five months' rent on their 6th-floor walk-up garret and are facing eviction.

Madeleine goes to meet with the big-time theatrical producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) and is offered a bit part in his new play—on the condition that she join him two afternoons a week in his bachelor apartment. She has to fight him off before she stalks out. Her weaselly lover André (Édouard Sulpice) visits with the news that he's getting engaged to a rich heiress to pay off his gambling debts, and plans to set Madeleine up as his mistress in an apartment owned by his future in-laws. "No rent!" he tells her enthusiastically.

"A dream life!": André (Édouard Sulpice) tries to convince Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) to become his mistress in François Ozon's The Crime is Mine.

Meanwhile, Pauline is having no better luck. She offers her legal services to a corrupt businessman who is about to be arrested, only to discover that thirteen lawyers have been there before her. And if Madeleine's love life is overcrowded with cads, Pauline's is "a desert."

"Let's be sensible and kill ourselves," Madeleine proposes, and puts a revolver to her head. Pauline ends the mock-suicide by offering Madeleine a ham-and-butter sandwich on baguette and an evening at the movies. In one of the many metacinematic and metatheatrical scenes in The Crime is Mine, they go to see Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed, 1935), the first film directed by Billy Wilder. [1]

But then the producer Montferrand is found shot to death, and suspicion falls on Madeleine as the last person known to have seen him alive. Pauline sees the proceedings as an employment opportunity for Madeleine: after all, witnesses are paid 12 francs a day. The incompetent, pompous investigating judge Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini) interrogates Madeleine by conjuring lurid scenarios, which are visualized as black-and-white silent melodramas: she murdered him in cold blood for money, and she'll be sentenced to 20 years of hard labor; she was his pregnant former mistress who murdered him in desperation when he wouldn't take her back, and she might be sentenced to five years in prison.

Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) threatens Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) in the vivid imagination of investigating judge Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini) in The Crime is Mine.

Then Pauline supplies a scenario that comes closest to the truth: Montferrand tried to rape Madeleine, and she killed him with his own gun in self-defense. On learning that if the jury accepts the plea of self-defense she might walk free, Madeleine confesses.

Pauline now has her first client, and plans to turn the courtroom into a theater to whip up a public fervor. Madeleine now has her first starring role. "Since no one will defend us," Pauline tells the all-male jury, "we women must defend ourselves."

"Madeleine Verdier killed to defend herself": Pauline (Rebecca Marder) makes her closing statement to the jury in The Crime is Mine.

She frames Montferrand's murder as an act of protest and resistance against a French society "dominated and corrupted by men." The proceedings in the courtroom are frequently interrupted by applause (from the women in attendance) and booing (from the men). Madeleine's trial is now front-page news, and she an overnight succès de scandale. But then the prosecutor turns their feminist defense against them: Madeleine must be made an example of, or every man must fear being killed in cold blood by the women in his life. He calls for the death penalty. . .

All the actors clearly relish their roles, and amid the fast-paced farce there are some quieter, subtler moments. There's a scene during the trial when it comes out that Madeleine and Pauline share a bed. "The lawyer and the criminal are strange bedfellows," Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalès) notes slyly, while the prosecutor (Michel Fau) exclaims that the murder is now explained by their "unnatural pairing" and "hatred of men." Pauline leaps to her feet to defend herself and her client. The men making these accusations have never known hardship or poverty. Yes, the two women share a bed—to keep warm and save space in their tiny apartment. "Forget the banal insinuations of these pathetic men," Pauline tells the jury.

We begin to suspect, though, that there's a reason beyond her poverty and rather severe fashion sense for the lack of men in Pauline's life. When Madeleine calls her "darling" and kisses her forehead, Marder shows us Pauline's sudden flush of embarrassment; the kiss and endearment clearly mean something far different to her than to Madeleine. And when the two women take a bath together and Madeleine unselfconsciously gets out and dons a robe, the camera lingers on Pauline's wistful face as she gazes after her.

"Silence is far more eloquent": Pauline (Rebecca Marder) in The Crime is Mine.

Based on the 1934 play Mon Crime by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, The Crime is Mine has a brilliantly clever script by François Ozon and his frequent collaborator Philippe Piazzo (they also co-wrote Frantz, one of my favorite films of 2017) and is wittily directed by Ozon. There's a reason Billy Wilder is invoked: with its sequence of surprising reversals, The Crime is Mine plays like one of Wilder's classic Hollywood comedies, which is high praise indeed. Many thanks to the dear friends who recommended this movie to us; let me pass on the favor by urging anyone who likes sparkling comedy to put it at the top of their watchlist.

Last time: Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

---

1. Mauvaise Graine has several plot parallels with The Crime is Mine, including an impulsively committed crime and a rich father who disowns his displeasing son.