Slow-cooking revenge tale from France, and from hitherto unknown director Denis Dercourt. The heroine, as a little girl and aspiring pianist, gets thrown off in her scholarship audition when one of the judges, a female pianist of some renown, takes time out in mid-performance to sign an autograph. Right then and there the little girl, as the phrase has it, turns a page. She shuts away the bust of Beethoven in a cabinet and locks up the keyboard for keeps. Years later, now a big girl, she worms her way into the employ of this same pianist, first as the substitute baby-sitter for her piano-practicing son, then as the literal page turner for the pianist herself, who is readying a concert-stage comeback in a piano trio -- Shostakovich, Schubert -- two years after a traumatizing car accident. Our primary identification is with the avenger, even though we are not privy to her plan (what's the fitting reprisal for a dashed dream?), but our sympathy is much more with her emotionally vulnerable target, who reveals herself to be no simple prima donna. The avenger comes across as something more of a hypothesis than a human being, a limitation underlined by the flat, opaque, expressionless acting of Déborah François, so natural in her first film, the Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant, so numb in this second one. The limitation is underlined further by the nuance, the tension, the vibrancy of Catherine Frot as the pianist, and still further by the warmth and directness of Clotilde Mollet as the trio's violinist. These two demonstrate once again that for actresses of a certain age, the French cinema maintains the friendliest climate on earth. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd