Anything for Her (‘Pour Elle’)

CRIME DRAMA; 1hr 36min (French with subtitles)

STARRING: Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger


Man with a plan: Kruger and Lindon

Julien (Lindon) and Lisa (Kruger) are a loving middle-class couple who hit a massive wall when she is arrested for a murder she didn’t commit. Three years on while Julien, furrowed in melancholy, raises their little boy (Lancelot Roch) and Lisa serves 20 years of pitiless time, chinks of light are non-existent. Lisa has become suicidal and Julien can take no more.

 

He plots her escape with the precision and focus of the teacher he is. It’s a crazy notion, of course: a desperate measure for desperate times. Yet in this spare and edgy telling by director and co-wrter Fred Cavayé, it’s completely credible that a man at the limits of endurance would gamble with everything he has.

 

Anything for Her is essentially Lindon’s show and he carries it with a veteran’s steadfastness. Julien isn’t especially endearing — even as a caring parent, the blues overwhelm him. But as the tension builds and the obstacles escalate, his fixated sense of purpose is so crazily admirable you can only hope he will win out.