Grade: B

The French seem to have a way with cool, slightly perverse contemporary thrillers, and “Alias Betty” (in the original, “Betty Fisher et autres histoires”) shows that Claude Miller is a good practitioner of the skill. Based on a novel (“The Tree of Hands”) by Ruth Rendell, it’s basically about mothers and children, but hardly handles the subject in a conventional way. Betty Fisher (Sandrine Kiberlain) is a Parisian novelist with a successful book and a single mother with a quiet, frail young son (Arthur Setbon). As the story opens (following a bizarre prologue in which we see young girl, whom we later recognize as Betty, attacked by her mother on a speeding train), Betty is welcoming her garrulous, argumentative mother Margot (Nicole Garcia) to the city, where we learn the older, obviously psychologically troubled, woman is to undergo medical tests. But the tension between mother and daughter becomes insignificant when Joseph accidentally falls from his bedroom window and dies not longer afterward in the hospital. Betty’s collapse at the news is witnessed by Jose (Alexis Chatrian), a boy roughly Joseph’s age, and soon we’re also introduced to his mother Carole (Mathilde Seigner), a selfish, hard-bitten waitress and her live-in current boyfriend Francois (Luck Mervil). Also in her circle are Alex (Edouard Baer), a seedy con-man who may be Jose’s father but is now involved with a rich older woman, a bartender infatuated with Carole, and a Russian mobster who takes a lustful interest in her. The linkage between the two plot threads comes when Margot, trying to make crazy amends for her earlier failures as a parent, kidnaps Jose and presents him to Betty as a replacement for Joseph. The daughter’s initial horror is gradually transformed into a reluctance to give up the child. Meanwhile Carole’s interest in recovering the boy wanes while Francois falls under suspicion for his disappearance, Francois believes that Alex might be responsible, and Alex is involved in a scheme to sell his patroness’ house and abscond with the proceeds. Lurking in the background are the highly emotional bartender and a kindly doctor (Roschdy Zem) who’s attracted to Betty (as she is to him, despite the fact that he could disclose Jose’s imposture), and Joseph’s father (Stephanne Freiss)–a slick, unsavory fellow–shows up as well.

The complications and coincidences imbedded in the convoluted plot are legion, and, together with a denouement featuring multiple collisions and ironies, they would strain credulity on screen (as they’re less likely to do when spread luxuriously over a few hundred pages of text) were it not for Miller’s unforced, quietly expressive style and absolutely electrifying performances from Kiberlain, Garcia and Seigner (who deservedly shared the best actress award at the 2001 Montreal Film Festival). The supporting cast is strong down the line, too. The atmospheric cinematography of Christophe Pollock and the music score, which uses a melange of well-chosen classical pieces, add to the gently unsettling, unpredictable mood.

Like Claude Chabrol, whose “La ceremonie” (1995) was also based on a novel by Rendell, Miller not only recognizes good source material but has the knack for transmuting a very British original into a convincingly Gallic enterprise. Miller is twelve years younger than Chabrol and not quite so prolific, but on the basis of this sharp psychological thriller–whose French title is far more suitable than the meaningless English one–he’s not far behind the old master.

Grade: B

Though the title might suggest that Anne Fontaine’s film is another of the many Hitchcockian thrillers that have come out of France lately, that turns out not to be the case. “How I Killed My Father” is instead a chilly, brooding but quietly resonant psychological study of domestic tension and unhappiness. Deliberate in its pacing, beautifully acted and skillfully directed, the picture requires a viewer’s patience and attention, but the effort pays substantial dividends.

The script, by Fontaine and Jacques Fieschi (whom you might know from his collaboration in the screenplays for two fine Claude Sautet films, the exquisite 1992 “Un coeur en hiver” and the equally effective 1995 “Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud,” though he also co-wrote two less successful recent pictures, “Place Vendome” and “Les Destinees”), opens as Jean-Luc (Charles Berling), a successful gerontologist with a clinic in Versailles, is being feted by the locals at an elegant soiree. To his astonishment, his long-absent father Maurice (Michel Bouquet) shows up at the gathering. Maurice abandoned the family years ago to set up a clinic in Africa; he returns impoverished as a result of a revolution that led to the confiscation of the property. Jean-Luc, clearly seething under a placid exterior, invites the old man to stay for a few days with him and his upper-class wife Isa (Natacha Regnier), but he’s clearly haunted by what he considers his father’s long-ago betrayal. Maurice’s attitude toward the sort of practice his son has set up–catering to the extravagantly well-to-do–doesn’t help matters; nor does the friendship the older man strikes up with Isa (whom Jean-Luc has counseled against having children, for what he says are medical reasons), or the rapprochement between Maurice and Jean-Luc’s younger brother Patrick (Stephane Guillon), an aspiring nightclub comic whom his sibling has taken on as a chauffeur. His father’s presence also seems a standing condemnation of Jean-Luc’s affair with his nurse Myriem (Amira Casar).

“How I Killed My Father” is thus focused on the emotional turbulence caused by the father’s long-delayed return. For Jean-Luc, Maurice’s reappearance reawakens his anger at the ease of his original desertion–a rage magnified with Maurice shows paternal affection for an African doctor (Hubert Kounde) who comes to visit. For Isa, it leads to a reconsideration of her marriage, and rage over the desperate lengths to which her husband has gone to avoid making his father’s mistakes. For Patrick, it represents perhaps his final opportunity to come to terms with his own failures. And for Maurice, of course, it provides a last chance to reconnect with his children. But none of this is played out in the melodramatic fashion such material would seem to invite. Fontaine’s is essentially a cerebral film in which the characters, apart from occasional eruptions, respond to their circumstances with typically Gallic reserve; much is implied rather than stated. The tone is set by Berling, who maintains an almost preternaturally calm exterior, and Bouquet, who as Maurice pads about in a scruffy coat or homely pajamas with an impish disdain for any kind of regret over his choices in life. The two men complement each other remarkably well–they even resemble one another sufficiently to be convincing as father and son. Regnier is excellent too, radiating suavity mingled with sadness, while Guillon is only slightly less impressive as the unfulfilled younger brother. The script is notable for its clean, crisp dialogue–the only miscalculations involve the occasional monologues that Patrick delivers, stand-up style, and a final confrontation between Maurice and Jean-Luc that breaks out into violence–and Fontaine directs with studied reticence, allowing the silences to convey more than the conversations. Jean-Marc Fabre’s cinematography and Jocelyn Pook’s score add to the atmosphere of bleakness beneath the surface.

The result is the kind of rarefied French film that won’t appeal to the multitudes but which–if you give yourself over to its moody, elliptical style–you might find much more compelling than the overtly dramatic, explicit fare that Hollywood usually offers.