Harlequin Romance

A PSFU DO HITCHCOCK thriller, romantic melodrama, and Gethic tale combined into one. Robin Davis new movie I Married A Shadow defies definition. On one hand, the movie is a refreshing thriller that portrays characters as more than mere props to be clanged, banged, and shuffled through "the story." There are times, however when the different emotional undercurrents flooding the film work at cross-purposes.

Nathalie Baye, remembered for her superb performance as the long-suffering wife of a medieval impostor in The Return of Martin Guerre, is here promoted to the role of a modern-day usurper, named Helene. As in Guerre, she starts out as the victim--this time, eight months pregnant, abandoned on the roadside by a villainous boyfriend. Desperate, Helene invests what money she has in a ticket to "the train to the sun," on the train she meets another pregnant woman. Patricia Meyrand and her husband, who are on their way to meet his parents in Bordeaux Loud, kind, and as aggressive as Helene is retiring. Patricia tries to look out for the abandoned woman, regaling her with memories of California--"Where dames take no guff"--and tales of the in-laws she is on her way to meet for the first time.

The next thing Helene knows, she wakes up in a hospital ward. The train has been derailed, the Meyrands killed, and Helene become mother to a healthy boy. What is more. Helene soon learns that she, found asleep in the Meyrands compartment, has been mistaken for Patricia. The old M Meyrand, obviously wealthy, infinitely benevolent, and accompanied by Pierre, a handsome, younger son, shows up to invite the new Patricia--Helene to join the family at its Chateau. At first adamant about recovering her identity. Helene begins to waver: there is, after all, nowhere else for her to go--the scheme is desperate, but so is she. Bizarrely enough, the in-laws had not even seen a wedding picture of the couple.

As Helene-Patricia makes the switch from rags to riches, settling down among people and sweeping scenery of enormous charm, we find it hard to believe she will be able to pull it oft. She is, it seems, simply too vulnerable, sweet, and above all, guileless, to survive under the circumstances.

BAYEDOES A SUPERB JOE as the victim coming across as infinitely fragile rather than unrelentingly wimpy--it is a time enough line. Emphasizing Helene's shame and reluctance at the situation, Baye makes her character seem almost innocent despite the deception she perpetrates. Every time she is forced to tell a lie or a half-truth, she just kind of chokes, and at times you cannot help wishing she would just make up her mind. As the emotional bonds that form between Helene and the in-laws grow stronger, however. Helene's dilemma becomes increasingly difficult to solve.

Eventually, Helen's fairy-tale life at the chateau begins to crumble. The simplest questions and gestures become threats as Helene has no way of knowing whether they are motivated by affection or by suspicious throughout the film we see the pressure gradually build up. At the first dinner with in-laws, she trips up on questions about vineyard:-- that she studied in California with her late husband--about his work, about how they met. "I was staring down into the Grand Canyon when he touched me on the shoulder." She stammers trying to recall what Patricia had said on the train."...no, we were in an art gallery: he didn't like it much...", after which she rushes out, in tears, before the baffled in-laws.

In a later scene, the Meyrands are posing for baby Bernard's baptismal picture when Helene herself gets confused about her identity. Near the photograph session, a group of schoolchildren is playing. Suddenly, a teacher calls out "Helene" to one of them and Helene-Patricia automatically swirls around. Pierre casts a cryptic stare at her.

The myriad little slips, whether noticed or not, already have Helene at the brink of panic when she receives a spate of anonymous letters, followed by the ex-boyfriend, oozing as much sleaze per celluloid inch as any villain in film history.

All throughout I Married A Shadow, characters like the cruel boyfriend emerge out of the mundane predictability of the "thriller" mechanism, acting irrationally as real people would. However, the collapse midway of the finely sustained tension is too abrupt to make the most of either half of the movie. While the cast manages to avoid histrionics, even amidst the emotional torrents of the end, the story threatens to collapse into a lachrymose mess. Then, presto-as in a paperback romance, all the pieces of the disheveled plot are suddenly tucked into place for an ending as picturesque as it is anti-climactic.