DVD Review: Don’t Look Back
Don’t Look Back (2009)
Studio: MPI Home Video
Release Date: November 16, 2010
Directed By: Marina de Van.
Cast: Sophie Marceau, Monica Bellucci, Andrea Di Stefano & Thierry Neuvic.
Review By: Annie Riordan
Can you imagine the pure horror of looking into the mirror one day and realizing that you are turning into Monica Bellucci? Yeah, wow, wouldn’t that just suck. I know GUYS who would be willing to turn into Monica Bellucci, if only to have the opportunity to feel themselves up constantly. Oh please dear god, do not curse me with the cursed curse of turning into a smoking hot French chick!
Nevertheless, it is this predicament that Jeanne (Sophie Marceau) inexplicably finds herself in one day. Happily married to a doting husband, blessed with two lovely children and enjoying a lucrative career as a biographical author, Jeanne is faced with her first major disappointment when her attempt at an autobiography is harshly rejected. Her publisher bluntly tells her that it’s awful. Even her own mother hates it. Hurt, Jeanne returns home to sulk…but soon finds that there is little solace to be found there either.
Home video footage shot by her husband reveals small but disturbing anachronisms in the arrangement of furniture, changes that no one but Jeanne can see. Slowly, but surely, her home rearranges itself. The faces of her husband and children become unrecognizable. A presence makes itself known at night, a ghost child that only Jeanne can see. Finally one day, Jeanne looks into a mirror and sees her own face changing; bone structure, hair color, everything, her features melting away and being replaced by the face of a stranger.
With both her family and herself fearing for her sanity, Jeanne finds a clue in an old photograph and follows the trail to Italy. She’s pretty sure that there’s something her mother isn’t telling her. She knows there has to be a logical reason why she cannot recall anything about her life before the age of eight. And I don’t know about you, but if I woke one day to find myself morphing into Monica Bellucci, I wouldn’t question it. I would simply thank the Lord and hit the dance clubs.
The first half of Don’t Look Back is quite intriguing. The paranoia, the mental confusion – Sophie Marceau nails the fragility of her character squarely on the head. That’s not to say that Monica Bellucci fails to interest us in the second half of the film. All of the answers that Jeanne seeks, and which we too so desperately want to see revealed, are indeed to be found in Italy. Unfortunately, they’re just not all that original or believable. The long-awaited revelation is a considerable letdown after watching Marceau and Bellucci struggle with Jeanne’s sanity for over an hour. Their efforts to deliver a convincing portrayal of a woman rapidly falling to pieces are rewarded with a plot twist which is more suited to a B-grade thriller. Both women deserve better but, to their credit, they carry this film in its entirety to its inevitable and cliched end with grace and ease.
Reading back over what I’ve written, it may seem as though I’m slamming this film. Really, I’m not. It’s definitely worth a view. Everything about the film is beautiful and professionally presented, from the lighting and scenery to the fully capable cast. Even the script is fine. But the mediocre story left me wanting, and was disappointingly anticlimactic after building so much tension and anguish over its first hour. Foreplay, no matter how expertly administered, doesn’t mean jack shit if there’s no orgasm in sight. And finishing yourself off just isn’t as much fun. This movie was a tease. A good and talented one, but a prematurely ejaculating tease all the same.
