Catherine Breillat has made a hot – or rather tepid – mess of this remake of the very recent Danish erotic thriller Queen of Hearts, and it’s not immediately clear why exactly she felt she needed to direct her own moderate version. The changes amount to smudging the original’s icy Scandi sheen, decreasing its erotic excitement, making the performances more laboured and thus leaving the story’s essential preposterousness dangerously exposed.
The first film, from writer-director May el-Toukhy, featured Trine Dyrholm as an elegant career lawyer specialising in representing rape victims who has a passionate affair with her teen stepson; that is, her husband’s moody son by his first marriage. Now the action is transplanted from chilly Denmark to sunny, summery France and Léa Drucker plays legal high-flyer Anne, married to wealthy but dull businessman Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), with two adorable adopted twin girls. She has a sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), who lives locally, has a less glamorous and successful life and is affectionately yet shrewdly unimpressed by Anne’s pretensions.
