Lead Us Not Into Temptation (2011) User Reviews

A story seen from three angles

[hof-4 · 7/10 · 5 September 2015]

In the first half of the movie a teenager (Anna/Sarah) seduces a middle aged man (Tristan), a subject that has been explored in many other films. However, by the second half the story veers into far darker and more complex territory.

There are actually three movies: the same story is told (or seen) by Tristan, then Anna, then Rachel, Tristan's wife. Many scenes are seen twice or three times, depending on whether two of the main characters or all three are involved. Each character has partial information, partly different than the information that the others have. In the end we finally understand what happened but not completely; for instance, exactly when does Rachel know what's happening? This is not a criticism; real life has plenty of loose ends.

Director and scriptwriter Cheyenne Carron handles this complex material with flair and good pacing, although perhaps credibility is strained here and there. Good production values. Excellent acting by all concerned.

Pretty effective French thriller

[lazarillo · 1 October 2015]

This French movie has a VERY familiar French-movie plot of a precocious teenage girl seducing a middle-age married man. That is really just a jumping-off point as the movie is told from three different perspectives--the man, the girl, and the man's wife--and a very different story eventually emerges. The multiple POV device is hardly new, but goes all the way back to "Citizen Kane", "Rashomon", and Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing", but it has been used most recently and famously in films like "Pulp Fiction". It doesn't always work and at times does little than make a film insufferably pretentious, but it does work here for the most part. Rather than the three stories contradicting each other (a la "Rashomon") the stories here are more like different puzzle pieces out of which the REAL story eventually emerges. It becomes obvious eventually that the wife and the girl have some kind of previous relationship even though it's not revealed until the very end.

Agnes Delchair, who plays the wife is the best actor in the movie, but she unfortunately stays rather opaque and mysterious until the end of the movie and her back story ends up being kind of rushed and includes her having an unnecessary relationship with the girl's jackass boyfriend. Guillemette Barioz fares better as the young seducer. Her character is a university-age "teen" seducer as opposed to the more perverse young teen seducer suggested by the lurid promotional materials, and the actress looks mature even for a university student. Her character goes through several interesting changes from a seemingly hapless waif to a sociopathic schemer, and finally to a character who is sympathetic but for an entirely different reason. She also has some nice nude/sex scenes, but for some reason, they take place in HER story whereas you'd think the sex would be much more memorable for the older man and appear in HIS story. Unlike with most young girls in movies like this, she does at least have a MOTIVE for getting sexually involved with a much older man.

Jean-Francois Garread, who plays the husband, is a pretty hapless and uninteresting character who is closer to elderly than middle-aged (his wife is already a much younger woman). The movie would definitely have been improved by a stronger and younger actor in this role, like say Mathieu Americ. Swann Artaud, who plays the abusive boyfriend and fourth character is flat-out miscast since he's skinny and effete and frankly Barioz looks like she could eat him for breakfast and pick her teeth with his bones afterward. This role would have benefited greatly from a scary thug as opposed to the typical French pretty-boy. Still, despite some miscasting and rushed reveals of the last story, this is pretty effective overall.

A reconciliation drama seen from three perspectives

[mickexandersson · 8/10 · 18 August 2021]

I especially liked that it started with the Tristan perspective, leading us to believe that the events happening to him are important.

The two women viewpoints and storylines are what's important (not just a trivial infidelity affair centered around a man), mother and daughter, later revealing that Tristan is just an innocent bystander, really quite unimportant to the main drama.

Elegantly written.

I liked the symmetries: that the mother and daughter independently, at the same time, started attempts to reach out to each other, that they in their youth both had/has relationships with toxic men.

I'm not sure that the third symmetry, that they both had sex with each others partners, was really necessary.

There's humour in that also the second male character (Stephán) is totally oblivious, as well as really just a superfluous annoyance.

So true - men are very seldom as important as they believe themselves and they often have no clue what's really going on... I guess the ending might be a glimpse of hope of future reconciliation, although the daughter ruined her mother's relationship, as intended, and the mother did the same thing to her daughter - maybe they can eventually start fresh again after this, which I like think was the daughter's ultimate goal when she initially approached her mother's husband.

Both men were obstacles to this reconciliation.

....but deliver us from evil.

[ulicknormanowen · 8/10 · 23 April 2022]

In the French cinema ,the multiple POV trick began at the same time as "citizen Kane " and well before "Rashomon " (remade by Ritt as"the outrage" ) : in the occupation days,an unsung director ,Albert Valentin did it twice ("Marie-Martine"(1942) and "la vie de plaisir (1944) );it continued in the sixties with André Cayatte who made two movies called "la vie conjugale " ,one seen through the husband's eyes ,the other through the wife's .Besides ,the initial situation is a perfect example of what the French call "théâtre de boulevard" which deals with the love triangle and mistaken identities .

Although the title is taken from a well-known Christian prayer , religion,a subject Miss Carron has often broached ("l'apôtre" , "la morsure des dieux",even "le corps sauvage " begins in a church) ,is completely absent here ;the very first picture ,which shows an injured man walking aimlessly on a road to nowhere is that of a God-forsaken world.

Carron dynamites the theatre de boulevard ,twists its codes ,and ,if it were not enough , did the same for the traditional melodrama ; it is not always successful ,particularly in the second part ("Anna" ) which is too often a mere repetition of the first ; past the effect of surprise (the same situation again) , it does not bring anything really new to the plot,except for a secondary male character (too underwritten to be interesting). But the movie regains its strength in the last chapter ("Rachel" ) ;although the truth is revealed long before the ending ,it makes sense for Carron did not want to make a traditional thriller either ; " do not lead up into temptation " is a psychological drama , in which the director watches her characters a la Claude Chabrol the entomologist of the bourgeois ,as though they were insects. One feels the husband is a grown-up kid (see the way how the young girl ,his "niece" ,plays with him ) who has always been dominated by a woman who's got the dough ("I'm a tiny tiny lawyer") and whose biggest misfortune ("we could never get one) is revealed by the girl's gaffe (but is it really a blunder? Wasn't she aware of his situation? )

Carron also dynamites the thriller : the young couple ,planning a swindle, is it a red herring?