On sojourn in France, Giuseppe Tornatore has left his sentimental humanism at home in Italy, and for a change of pace plunges into a Polanski-esque thriller, dark, cramped, cryptic, unreal (or irreal) (or surreal), with Polanski himself on hand for validation, in the part of a provincial police inspector engaged in a night-long interrogation of a renowned novelist who goes by the pseudonym of Onoff (Gerard Depardieu, looking about nine-and-a-half-months pregnant). The cat-and-mouse Q-and-A is interrupted only by an aborted escape attempt and by brief flashbacks fine-chopped into teasing glimpses or blistering salvos: more flash than back. The environmental details -- the unrelenting rain, the pots positioned beneath the leaky roof, the mud-encrusted shoes, the clock without hands, the rattrap in the liquor cabinet -- are well done. In fact the whole thing is well done in the sense of done with care, done with skill. But it's also stagy, static, overdirected in compensation, contrived, pretentious, tedious. Silliest shot (on several occasions, with varying distances of focus): looking up through the silhouetted typewriter keys, and apparently also through the top of the desk, at the face of the police typist. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.