Eva – first look review

Benoît Jacquot has made a con­sid­er­able name for him­self over the span of a 40-year career direct­ing enig­mat­ic French thrillers. His rep­u­ta­tion, teamed with the cast­ing of lead­ing French tal­ents Isabelle Hup­pert and Gas­pard Ulliel in a new adap­ta­tion of James Hadley Chase’s nov­el Eva sounds the per­fect recipe for a sen­su­al psy­chodra­ma revolv­ing around a com­plex world of secrets and lies. Unfor­tu­nate­ly there’s sim­ply not enough sub­stance to war­rant the supreme­ly ques­tion­able film which is the result­ing product.

Ulliel plays Bertrand, a grift­ing young play­wright strug­gling to write a new work, who hap­pens upon Huppert’s tit­u­lar Eva dur­ing a trip to his girlfriend’s par­ents’ chalet. Quick­ly revealed to be a high-class escort with no time for Bertrand’s self-indul­gence, Eva is by far the most inter­est­ing thing about the film, played with Huppert’s usu­al wit and grace. She presents Eva as a woman ful­ly in con­trol of her des­tiny, whom – despite the impli­ca­tion of her pro­fes­sion – refus­es to rescind con­trol to the men that inhab­it her world. There’s a can­dour about Eva which makes her infi­nite­ly watch­able, but in fram­ing Bertrand as the film’s pro­tag­o­nist, we only ever glimpse at the woman real­ly pinned beneath Bertrand’s scru­ti­n­is­ing gaze.

There’s a def­i­nite chem­istry between Ulliel and Hup­pert, but it’s sad­ly wast­ed in a bland, pre­dictable script direct­ed with unimag­i­na­tive flour­ish­es. Some­how it feels like a par­o­dy of a French film – the sort of glossy, wink­ing sex­u­al dra­ma that out­siders to French cin­e­ma assume the coun­try cre­ates en masse. If this was inten­tion­al per­haps it would make for an inter­est­ing com­men­tary on society’s obses­sion with sex and age, but there’s too much packed into a mud­dled script for it to real­ly func­tion as a suc­cess­ful satire.

Most irri­tat­ing is how the film wastes its cast, with Ulliel’s char­ac­ter lit­tle more than a con­niv­ing bore, and every­one else a bit-play­er in the chaos he cre­ates through his self­ish nature. The res­o­lu­tion, when it even­tu­al­ly limps into view, feels supreme­ly unsat­is­fy­ing. It’s a film that not only feels like it’s been made before, but feels unbear­ably smug too.