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'In the Name of My Daughter': Misguided love meets lust for money

Prolific French director André Téchiné, who tackled a true-life legal case in 2009's The Girl on the Train, returns to the genre with In the Name of My Daughter, a fascinating, suspenseful story about obsessive love, money, the Mafia, and murder.

Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet in “In the Name of My Daughter.” (Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group)
Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet in “In the Name of My Daughter.” (Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group)Read more

Prolific French director André Téchiné, who tackled a true-life legal case in 2009's The Girl on the Train, returns to the genre with In the Name of My Daughter, a fascinating, suspenseful story about obsessive love, money, the Mafia, and murder.

The film tells of a crime that has fascinated the French for more than three decades: the disappearance in 1977 of casino heiress Agnès Le Roux (Adèle Haenel), a beautiful young divorcee who returns home to Nice from Africa after a disastrous five-year marriage.

She finds herself embroiled in an economic war between her mother, Renée Le Roux (Catherine Deneuve), and a powerful local businessman named Fratoni (Jean Corso), a suspected Mafia money-launderer.

Deneuve is brilliant as Renée, a steely-willed widow whose badly managed multimillion-dollar Palais de la Méditerranée casino is hemorrhaging money during an economic downturn. Things go from bad to worse when Fratoni begins a campaign of intimidation to buy out the Le Roux family.

Deeply depressed by her divorce, Agnès finds herself drawn to one of her mother's lawyers, a scrappy young upstart named Maurice (Guillaume Canet) whose ridiculous demeanor - always serious, he wears his tight three-piece suit even on the beach - conceals a cynical, calculating, and brilliant intellect.

Canet turns in an astounding performance as Maurice, whose inscrutable face gives away nothing. He is scrupulously honest with Agnès, telling her that she is only one of his numerous lovers. What he doesn't tell her is that he lives off the generosity of his lovers, all of whom seem to be quite wealthy.

Things turn ugly when Renée refuses to give Maurice a plum job at her company. Using Agnès, who has considerable holdings in the casino, the lawyer comes up with a scheme to help Fratoni take over the Palais de la Méditerranée and make himself a big pot of cash.

Once the dirty business is done, Agnès disappears.

Téchiné's approach is nothing short of brilliant: He gives us a deep understanding of the psychological dynamics in this strange story by spending most of the film retelling the story of Agnès' doomed relationships with her mother and Maurice. This leaves the director with only about 20 minutes to show us the strange series of court cases that followed Agnès' disappearance.

While Agnès' body was never recovered, her mother was convinced she had been murdered, and repeatedly petitioned prosecutors to go after Maurice.

The lawyer, who pocketed all of Agnès' money and moved first to Canada, then to Panama, was put on trial no less than three times. He was acquitted in the 1980s, but that verdict was overthrown in 2005. In a strange turn of events, he was convicted in 2014 after his own son testified against him. He is appealing the verdict.

Téchiné's film is adapted from the memoir Une femme face à la Mafia, written by Renée Le Roux and her son, Jean-Charles Le Roux, in the late 1980s and updated after the 2014 trial. But one does not have to be familiar with the book or the facts of the case to enjoy this superb, beautifully crafted psychological thriller.

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