Review of The Page Turner (2006) by V H — 15 Apr 2007

While her father hacks away at a side of beef in the family's storefront butcher shop, little 10-year-old Melanie practices the piano in the adjoining apartment. An intense child with a Wednesday Addams-like demeanor, Melanie is preparing for her big conservatory entrance exam, her ticket away from the world of bloody cleavers and amputated chicken feet.

When audition day arrives, Melanie is the picture of composure. She begins her piece flawlessly and the judges seem suitably impressed. And then it happens -- a woman tippytoes into the room and is waved on over to the judge's table by the jury chairwoman, a famous concert pianist named Madame Fouchécourt. As Fouchécourt signs an autograph, Melanie gets distracted and stops playing. Fouchécourt instructs Melanie to continue, but she's too flustered by the interruption to recover and botches the remainder of the piece. The judges shake their heads wearily. Better luck next year, Melanie.

Had Melanie been a normal little girl, her disappointment would eventually be assuaged with hugs and Happy Meals, but Melanie is most certainly not a normal little girl. When she returns home, she carefully packs away her Mozart statuette, closes the lid to her piano, locks it shut, and never plays again.

Ten years later...

Little Melanie has grown into a beautiful young woman with long strawberry blonde hair and flawless skin, save for a melanomic-looking mole on the right side of her neck. She's just been hired as an intern to a secretary at a Paris law firm. The secretary, we soon find out, works for a lawyer named Jean Fouchécourt, who's none other than the husband of the woman whose inconsiderate behavior caused Melanie to blow her big audition ten years earlier. Clearly this is not a coincidence.

Melanie works hard and is the model intern. She keeps her nose to the grindstone and her ears open and eventually gets the big break she's been hoping for. She happens to overhear a conversation concerning the Fouchécourt's unsuccessful search for childcare for the upcoming school holidays and quickly volunteers. Monsieur Fouchécourt seems hesitant at first, but soon reconsiders. If he can trust Melanie to do his copying and filing, why not trust her to care for his precious son, Tristan? Oh what the heck. Melanie, you've got yourself the job!

Melanie arrives at the Fouchécourt's country estate and soon makes herself an integral part of the household. When she's not playing hide-and-seek with young Tristan, she's whipping up scrumptious meals for the entire family. And as luck would have it, she even knows how to read music, a skill that's discovered when she saunters into the piano room while Madame Fouchécourt is practicing and turns the page of her sheet music at precisely the right moment. And guess what? Madame Fouchécourt's longtime page turner recently left the position, so she's actually in need of a new one.

This perfect unfolding of Melanie's apparent revenge plot strikes me as just a tad too improbable. I'll buy the internship at Monsieur Fouchécourt's law firm, but to so quickly parlay that into a job as the Fouchécourt's nanny and then further into a job as Madame Fouchécourt's trusted page turner... wow, that Melanie is as lucky as she is devious. And thorough too. Not only does she set out to destroy Madame Fouchécourt's musical career, but she also takes aim at the Fouchécourt's marriage and even tricks innocent lad Tristan into developing tendonitis. Now, that's just pure evil.

Despite the fact that we know where it's going all the way, [i]The Page Turner [/i]still manages to sustain a nice creepy feel throughout. If not for the fact that the plot is so contrived -- including a dubious romantic subplot between the two women -- it would be a far better movie. As it stands, if you can manage to simply ignore the far-fetched series of coincidences upon which this film is based, you're likely to find it to be spine-tinglingly enjoyable.