Nobody Else But You (2011) 

Poupoupidou 

Directed by: Gérald Hustache-Mathieu

Blocked crime novelist David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) finds himself in the small town of Mouthe on the French-Swiss border, where the body of local celebrity weather presenter (and face of Belle de Jura cheese), Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton) has just been found in a snow-covered field in no-man’s land.  The authorities treat her death as an open and shut case of suicide, but something prompts Rousseau to dig around, and the more he digs (in the mortuary, her home, and amongst her acquaintances and fans) the more he suspects that the Marilyn Monroe-lookalike (and, increasingly, behave-alike) was murdered.

Opening with softly sexy scenes from a photo-shoot clearly modelled on Bert Stern’s famous Last Sitting images of Monroe, Hustache-Mathieu presents a gentle comedy-thriller (there are too many attempts on the life of poor Rousseau to call this a drama) that never trivialises its subject matter.  In fact, beneath the blanket of humour the director wields a scalpel to cut away any conception we may have had that Marilyn’s story was something that could only have happened half a century ago rather than today.  

The obvious parallels between Marilyn’s CV and Candice’s at first suggest a slightly loopy belief on the part of the latter that she is truly a reincarnation of the former. But as the narrative develops, we see the story is an utterly believable one of twenty-first century celebrity.  Interspersed with the main events, we are shown casually strewn images of women that indicate that, for some at least, women’s bodies are just objects (most notably a brilliantly repellent scene involving a dexterity puzzle featuring Courbet’s L’Origine Du Monde).

If Lacoeur is Monroe, then Rousseau is perhaps James Ellroy (he is mentioned more than once), whose much darker work has also featured Norma-Jean. But it is Ellroy’s voice in his autobiographical My Dark Places that comes to mind – you can almost hear the detective-writer saying: “He learned that men kill women because…” as Rousseau uncovers clues and motivations that point to one potential killer after another. Some may find the resolution a little too neat, eschewing a single murderer in favour of a kind of mass complicity.  But for the point he is making, that is the more credible conclusion.

Hustache-Mathieu has an elegantly light touch, and presents the homage aspects of the story playfully without distorting the message. Terrific.