Pour elle (2008)

User Rating:

7.2/10   

Director:

Fred Cavayé

Writers:

Fred Cavayé (writer)
Guillaume Lemans (story)

Release Date:

3 December 2008 (France)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Romance | Thriller

Tagline:

Dans un instant, leur vie va basculer... (In a second, their life will change...)

Plot:

With no legal means left to him, a high school teacher devises a daring plan to rescue his wrongfully imprisoned wife from jail.

Plot Keywords:

Arrest | Prison | Jail | Police | Hospital Room

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Vincent Lindon	...	Julien
Diane Kruger	...	Lisa
Lancelot Roch	...	Oscar
Olivier Marchal	...	Henri Pasquet
Hammou Graïa	...	Commandant Susini
Liliane Rovère	...	La mère de Julien
Olivier Perrier	...	Le père de Julien
Moussa Maaskri	...	Martial
Rémi Martin	...	Capitaine Jousseaume
Thierry Godard	...	Pascal
Slimane Hadjar	...	David
Dorothée Tavernier	...	Nathalie
Alaa Oumouzoune	...	Mouss
Joseph Beddelem	...	Hassan
Ivan Franek	...	Dragan

Also Known As:

Anything for Her (International: English title)

Runtime:

96 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Colour:

Colour

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby SR (Digital)

Certification:

Switzerland:14 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:14 (canton of Vaud) | France:U (certificate #118775) | Sweden:15 | Ireland:15A | Canada:14A (British Columbia) | Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:18A (Manitoba) | Canada:PG (Ontario) | New Zealand:R16

Filming Locations:

Liège, Liège Province, Belgium

Company:

Fidélité Films

Trivia:

The idea for the film came from Guillaume Lemans. Once Fred Cavayé got involved, the two men started out by working on the film separately before sharing their ideas. Cavayé then wrote the first draft of the screenplay himself, and so on.

Movie Connections:

Remade as The Next Three Days (2011)

Classy french thriller

Julien and Lisa are a happy loving couple living quiet, ordinary lives in their quiet, ordinary apartment with their baby son Oscar. Then one evening the doorbell rings, Julien opens the door and their lives are thrown into chaos. Police swarm into the apartment, pounce on Lisa and arrest her for the murder of her boss. Three years later Lisa has lost her last appeal against her 20 year jail term and is finally giving up hope – and giving up on life. She stops taking insulin trying to slowly commit suicide. Julien is a desperate man. He tracks down a notorious criminal who has written a best-selling book on his several successful escapes from prison. And so his plan begins. 'Anything For her' is a typical solid French thriller. There are no sudden twists or turns in a plot that relies on the natural tension of the situation to keep it going. The meticulous planning of the jail-break is compelling as you watch Julien turn his apartment into effectively an operations room. The walls are lined with maps and photographs, with graphs and plane schedules, and with heavily underlined questions such as "Escape Route?" He tells Lisa nothing about what he's doing and begs her to just hang on. He intends to sell her mother's house to raise the money they'll need to start a new life but then Lisa is told she is to be transferred to another prison and so Julien must speed up his plans and raise the money somewhere else. The tension and the pressure of it on Julien is almost unbearable and never lets up. The director is determined that there be no distraction from this, his main focus of the film and quickly shows, practically at the start, what actually happened to Lisa's boss so that that whole aspect of the story is quickly dismissed and forgotten about. It's not an all-out masterpiece by any means but it is a very entertaining, at times gripping film that does exactly what it says on the tin. Vincent Lindon is practically a veteran of these things and forces you to feel real empathy for Julien while Diane Kruger does well with what is really a much smaller part, fully conveying the nightmare of prison life and the physical decline it brings.