Archive listings for Harry, He's Here to Help

Observer (11Jan01): [Dominik Moll]'s thriller begins with an edgy casualness. One hot summer day, the 34-year-old Michel Pape ([Laurent Lucas]), a good-looking teacher of French to Japanese students, is driving south from Paris in his clapped-out saloon with his sensible wife, Claire ([Mathilde Seigner]), and three fractious little daughters. Their destination is the dilapidated old farmhouse on the foothills of the Monts du Cantal that they've bought with the help of his overbearing dentist father and his querulous mother and are doing up a little at a time. Harry, He's Here to Help is superbly performed by its central quartet, and by the actors playing Michel's somewhat disagreeable parents and his louche brother. A profoundly disturbing work, it's the best European movie in a Hitchcockian vein since George Sluizer's The Vanishing and is made with a confident grace and ironic wit. It also has one of the best mobile phone jokes, which will remind many viewers of a famous scene involving a corpse in Frenzy.