A Quiet Delight

A surprise standout in the competition at Cannes last year, neophyte director Dominik Moll's With a Friend Like Harry? (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien) is a quiet delight. An insistent, insinuating film -- both in terms of its plot and characters, and in its impact on the viewer -- Harry's effects are small-scale but so perfectly pitched that they never seem small.

Like his master Alfred Hitchcock, Moll, a German filmmaker working in France, knows that the greatest terrors come not from ferocious monsters with blood dripping from their mouths. They reside, rather, just under the surface of "normal" life, where they benignly lie in wait for unsuspecting passersby who mistakenly believe boredom is their greatest enemy. Michel (Laurent Lucas) and Claire (Mathilde Seigner) and their three small children are zipping down the freeway, and things are going badly in a way that will be familiar to middle-class parents all over the world. It's hot, and the kids are screaming. Michel decides to pop into a rest area for a quick pee and runs into an old lycée chum, Harry (Spanish actor Sergi Lopez). Michel can't quite place him, but Harry seems to remember everything about Michel, even, uncannily, a poem that Michel wrote while at the lycée and which he has completely forgotten in the meantime.

Harry quickly takes things in hand. Screaming kids? No problem, Harry's got air conditioning in his fancy car. He sets himself and his girlfriend Plum (Sophie Guillemin) up for an invitation back to Michel and Claire's half-built, jerryrigged vacation home, even though it's hundreds of miles out of their way. Then, over the next couple of days, Harry gradually insinuates himself into Michel's family life, becoming indispensable. Claire's car's a junk heap? No problem, Harry buys her a new SUV. Michel and Claire are offended by the impropriety of the gift, but accept it anyway, since, after all, it does make life easier. Harry believes that every problem has a solution and it's silly not to avail oneself of it. But when the problems concern more important things like Michel's bickering, interfering parents, for example, Harry's solutions begin to seem a bit, shall we say, disproportionate.

Like Hitchcock, Moll knows exactly where to put his camera, when to cut, and when to punctuate his visuals with just the right sound. (Moll embeds his homage to the master in Harry's full name, Harry Balestrero, which recalls both Hitchcock's film The Trouble with Harry and Manny Balestrero, the protagonist of The Wrong Man.) These Hitchcockian effects are so exactly right that I didn't even notice most of them until I had seen the film a second time. Moll's a master at creating and conveying tension, even visually, down to the level of the jostling, garish colors that purposely crowd the screen and subliminally suggest the not-so-hidden nightmarish quality of contemporary suburban life. The film's also hilarious, in an understated way, with each new "solution" by Harry pushing the limits of the permissible toward the outrageous. The acting is thoroughly professional, nothing flashy, Lucas and Seigner simply, grandly believable as the harried would-be yuppies, Guillemin as Harry's dumb but sexy and adoring girlfriend, and the terrific Sergi Lopez, who has a great career ahead of him, as the suave yet strangely disturbing and obsessive Harry.

At a deeper level, it's clear that Moll's principal Hitchcockian influence has come from the classic Strangers on a Train, in which the two central figures who meet, in fact, as strangers on a train, are involved in swapping murders of inconvenient family members. Like the Robert Walker character in the Hitchcock film, Harry, a deliberately mysterious character whose origins and whose sources of information are never fully revealed, is clearly the protagonist's alter-ego, that part in all of us who would dearly love to deal with hectoring relatives, or even the guy who runs a red light, by murdering them.

The great thing about Harry, though, is that it plays so naturally that you never feel like you're working out some obscurely profound art film. It's just everyday life, and, as seen by Hitchcock and Moll, that's profound, and scary, enough.