Anything For Her

Following in the footsteps of Gallic-tinged thrillers Tell No One and Taken, Anything For Her confirms that vigilantism is firmly in vogue on the cinematic catwalk. Now it’s everyman schoolteacher Julien (Vincent Lindon) walking the moral tightrope, as he moves heaven, earth and his Volvo estate to combat his beloved wife Lisa’s (Diane Kruger) wrongful imprisonment for murder.

Director Fred Cavayé manages to mask the vacuum of originality at the heart of this narrative by coaxing emotive performances from his excellent leads. Kruger’s porcelain fragility never fails to pluck the heartstrings, while Lindon’s face is a portrait of careworn suffering. Haul your eyes away from his weather-beaten face for a moment, though, and the cracks in the film’s dramatic structure start to widen into hairline fractures.

As Anything For Her gathers momentum, plot holes and narrative inconsistencies get papered over with alarmingly thin sheets of cliché. Meanwhile, the moral questions at the heart of the drama (did she actually do it? When, if ever, can vigilantism be justified?) have long ago been swept aside in favour of prosaic plot devices. With Cavayé seemingly intent on suffocating the film’s moral ambiguity, Anything For Her soon falters.

It doesn’t take the sharpest shrink to realise that the injustice meted out to Lisa, along with the increasingly unhinged steps Julien takes to remedy the situation, make their son, Oscar (Lancelot Roch), the real victim of the piece. It’s ironic, then, that – with a psychological simplicity that would try the credulity of any five-year-old – their child is largely treated as a blond-haired, blue-eyed prop rather than a character in his own right.

Anything For Her proves a competent candyfloss film, but with a suspicious aftertaste of Brussels sprout. Despite its relative lack of substance, it doesn’t quite deliver the cheap pay-off you’d expect from a crime thriller and, like a barefoot toilet cleaner in Cell Block H, ends up falling between two stools.

Mike Brett

Anticipation:

Sounds like a L’Oréal ad, but the cast is intriguing.

Enjoyment:

A familiar story, but there’s just enough tension holding it together.

In Retrospect:

What’s the French for ‘déjà vu’?