Very Cool!!!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Like so many contemporary French thrillers,"cette femme-là" is no substance and all atmosphere.Josiane Balasko portrays a cop down in the dumps ,desperate because of her only son's death on the 29 th of February.Every four year,when the fatal date gets closer,she begins to have awful nightmares all about suicide.A woman hung herself (or was she helped?) in a wood.Balasko investigates and finds herself in the heart of a muddled confusing story.The final lines on the screen are ,par excellence,the easy way out.The picture is dirty à la "Seven" and the music is lugubrious although,oddly ,the old fifties hit "young love" comes back from time to time along with other American easy-listening tunes.There's the obligatory hint at S/M,the obligatory gay interest and the obligatory moving "mum's alone" story.THe screenplay is finally derivative and all we see on the screen was treated by George Simenon a long time ago.You'd better choose Nicloux's "Une affaire privée" (2002) which had at least a disturbing ending.

The middle-age detective Michèle Varin (Josiane Balasko) is a troubled and depressed woman in therapy because of the death of her eight years son four years ago. She has many nightmares, all of them related to death, and she has thought in committing suicide. When she is assigned to investigate the murder of a woman found hanging on a tree in the woods suggesting suicide, she becomes obsessed by the case. During the investigations, her state of mind gets worse and she confuses nightmares with reality.I saw "Cette Femme-là" with great expectation, attracted by the César award indication of Josiane Balasko and the dark cover of the DVD. The development of the story is not totally bad, but the confused conclusion is very disappointing. I did not understand the reason of the murder of Varin's partner and the messy last scene of the puzzle suggesting that she had just imagined the whole plot. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "A Face do Medo" ("The Face of the Fear")

`Cette-femme la ` is a surprising thriller. Different to anything you see lately. The movie plays with the spectator, instead of letting be just a witness; and in the game is comes the over the top suspense. A forty plus years old police officer, is in a highly depressive state due to his son dead years ago. We never know exactly how, but it seems guilt is all over her.In one anniversary, Michele (the outstanding Josianne Balasko) becomes more and more obsessed with suicide. Everything around her seems to suggest it is time to end her life. A mysterious crime in the forest, turn up a series of coincidences and deaths, that we are never sure if they are real or in the woman's mind.The movie becomes darker every second, but it is better not explain more, otherwise it will ruin the perfectly crafted suspense. Just a comment; as in another outstanding thriller (`Skin Deep' from the Peruvian director Lombardi), the police plot is secondary to the real story in the movie.

Our mature cop lady heroine is fighting her own demons which get mixed in with her messy case. This policier has good production values, seriousness of purpose, a strong central performance by Balasco (who even does nude scenes which really is game) and ingenious plot twists. It should be better.The lack of conviction in a lot of contemporary French product is hard to diagnose. There's certainly no lack of talent.Someone explain why the poster for this one is more involving than the film itself.