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

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

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

seymourblack-1 This movie has a hypnotic quality that makes it compelling right from the start and its story about a young woman with an agenda that's driven by an incident from her past is totally gripping and extremely disturbing. Director Denis Dercourt does a great job as he skilfully creates an uneasy atmosphere and also mirrors the kind of meticulous approach that the woman employs as she seeks to exact revenge on the person that she holds responsible for ruining her chances of having a career as a classical pianist.Melanie Prouvost (Julie Richalet) was a talented 10-year-old pianist who auditioned for entry to a prestigious conservatory in Paris where the judging panel was chaired by the famous and well-respected concert pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot). The audition started well but Ariane insensitively disrupted Melanie's performance when she signalled an autograph hunter to come into the room and, in so doing, caused Melanie to lose concentration and fail her exam. The young girl, who was naturally devastated, went home, locked her piano lid and immediately gave up her musical studies.Ten years later, Melanie (Deborah Francois) is taken on as an intern in the law firm which is headed by Ariane's husband Jean (Pascal Greggory) and when she hears that he needs someone to look after his son while he's away on business for a few weeks, Melanie volunteers for the job. At Jean's luxurious country mansion, she discovers that Ariane has become emotionally fragile after her involvement in a car accident and had suffered with stage fright ever since. Ariane doesn't recognise Melanie but soon comes to appreciate her work as she plays tennis with her son and helps with his piano studies.When she discovers that Melanie can read music and is more than capable as a "page turner", Ariane starts to gain more confidence about an important radio concert that she's due to perform in as part of a trio and the two women become closer as Melanie becomes indispensable to Ariane in a number of ways. The cool, calm and calculating Melanie pursues her aims in a very determined and seemingly detached way until appropriately, she achieves her objective, partially by getting Ariane to sign an autograph and exploiting the same vanity and conceit that the older woman had displayed years earlier at Melanie's fateful audition."The Page Turner" is elegant, subtle and cleverly understated but is also clearly influenced in its style by Claude Chabrol and the sequence at the end of the movie where Melanie walks away from the mansion is reminiscent of a scene featuring Stephane Audran at the end of "La Femme Infidele" (1969). Similarly, a Hitchcockian influence is evident in the early part of the movie where natural sympathy with Melanie's predicament later causes the audience to feel conflicted about her actions (in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock did in "Psycho" with Marion Crane's character).The quality of the acting in this movie is consistently high but naturally, because of the significance of their roles, Catherine Frot and Deborah Francois stand out. Frot creditably makes the self-regarding, insensitive Ariane that we see at the beginning of the story every bit as convincing as the vulnerable and nervous woman that she later becomes and Francois is absolutely mesmerising as the placid-looking Melanie who so cruelly gets her revenge by damaging the lives of all three members of Ariane's family. Rarely can there have ever been a home invasion drama in which the invaded were so oblivious to what was going on and where the invader succeeded so comprehensively in what they set out to do.

paul2001sw-1 'The Page Turner' is a suspenseful thriller, but in a cool, elegant and understated way: a typically French movie. The plot tells of a young musician slighted by a somewhat self-obsessed pianist, who subsequently gets her revenge through subtly undermining the older woman's confidence. The film is quite good at maintaining a foreboding mood, the girl gives nothing away and the viewer is tempted to assume the end may be bloody or contrived; it's slightly disappointing when the resolution, though believable, turns out to be altogether more straightforward. I think I would have liked just a little more twist; but the movie is commendable for its avoidance of pyrotechnics in favour of the mood of growing apprehension it cultivates instead. A cultivated film, indeed.

dromasca Several comments around this movie used the saying 'revenge is a dish served cold' which seems to resume so well the story. A young girl sees her dream to become a pianist broken when a famous pianist in the jury negligently signs an autograph and distracts her during the admission exam to the music school. Many years later we see her grown up as an anonymous secretary hired to be a nanny and than a page turner to the pianist, in fact devising an elaborate revenge.The thrill and the failure of the movie lie both in the cool and sophisticated building of the revenge, with an expectation of violence that never becomes real. The young assistant brilliantly played by Déborah François - looking here like a kind of a French version of Scarlett Johansson - comes from a socially inferior milieu but one who hints to violence (her father is a butcher). Yet her revenge as much we expect to be violent is mostly psychological, she wins the confidence of the whole family just to break the career of the pianist making her fail at a key audition, and to distort the style and cause pain to her son, also an aspiring piano pupil. The quality of the film can be found in the description o the subtle class differences between the characters and in the intellectual and music filled atmosphere that envelops almost all the duration of the screening. Here lies also however the failure of the film, at least for viewers who did not come to watch a pure art film, who will leave I think as I did, with a feeling of in-satisfaction because as the revenge seems to be too cool and non-balanced relative to the breaking a child's dreams in life. As most of the viewers are in cinema theaters to watch something else than a good camera music concerto, I am afraid that they will share my opinion.

Terrell-4 Twelve-year-old Melanie Prouvost is determined to become a world-class pianist. She practices with a single-mindedness which is daunting. She arrives with her mother at a conservatory where she will perform a difficult piece before a panel of judges. Many other children are competing. If she wins, her chances for a wonderful career will lie in front of her. As she takes her place at the piano and begins, one of the judges, a famous concert pianist, motions in a fan who wants an autograph. The judge whispers something, takes out a pen, thinks a moment, writes on the photo and returns it to the fan. Melanie's concentration is broken. She stops, tries to recover and performs badly. Afterwards, the judge simply comments that there was no reason for Melanie to stop. On the way out of the conservatory, Melanie suddenly pushes down the key cover on a piano when another girl is practicing, nearly crushing the girl's fingers. Melanie arrives home and locks her piano for good. Several years later, Melanie (Deborah François), now a striking young woman, applies for and is accepted as an intern in a law office. She learns a senior partner needs someone to look after his young son while he is away for several weeks on business. His wife works and cannot always be available. When Melanie says she'd happily look after the boy, she is accepted. And when she arrives at the country manor, 25 miles outside Paris, we learn that the mother was in an auto accident and is still emotionally fragile. The woman, Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot), indeed works. She is a world-class pianist who now performs as part of a trio. And, yes, she was the judge who so thoughtlessly ruined Melanie's life ambition. She doesn't even remember the incident. Now we realize Melanie remembers all too well. All along we've noted how quiet Melanie is. She observes; sometimes there will be the smallest of smiles. Melanie becomes almost indispensable to Ariane, who suffers stage fright now. Melanie becomes her page turner, the person who sits next to a pianist and turns the pages of the score as the pianist plays on. She begins to give Ariane confidence. We're not sure where the movie is heading. All we know is that a number of uneasy things happen that could be explained away. Melanie gains the confidence of Tristan, the boy, but twice seems to place him in positions of peril that don't quite happen. She opens some letters and smiles just a bit, but we're not sure why. She subtly seems to be almost wooing Ariane, yet shows no particular interest. We remember Melanie is the daughter of butchers and know she must be familiar with slicing into meat. Does this mean we'll soon be watching her turn Tristan into lamb chops? The movie keeps us off balance. While it's possible that at some point we'll realize that Melanie still loves the piano and we may end with her giving Ariane back confidence while Ariane decides to work with Melanie on a career for her, we also realize that the movie just might end the way Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie does, with a slaughter fired by resentment and rage. No one dies in this movie, just the soul of one of the characters. The Page Turner is a not- quite-a-thriller thriller, and is all the more disturbing because of it. François and Frot give marvelous performances, with François unnervingly calm and Frot fragile to a fault. This was only Deborah François' second movie. At 19, she almost out-Hupperts Isabelle Huppert. There is some great music in the movie. The trio, with Melanie as the page turner for Ariane, does a rehearsal of Shostakovich's opus 67, trio in E minor. It's terrific. The Page Turner is almost as good at keeping us off balance.