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‘The Crime Is Mine’ Review: Everyone Wants To Be a Murderess In François Ozon’s Feathery French Farce
Guy Lodge Film Critic Quick, silly and lent weight only by the costume department’s copious wigs and furs, “The Crime Is Mine” finds tireless French auteur François Ozon in the playful period pastiche mode of “Potiche” and “8 Women.” It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine. This story of an aspiring stage star standing trial for a top impresario’s murder (and making the most of her moment in the tabloid flashbulbs) may be based on a nearly 90-year-old play, but for those versed more in Hollywood and Broadway than in French theater, Ozon’s adaptation resembles a kind of diva fanfic: What if Roxie Hart went up against Norma Desmond, except in rollicking 1930s Paris? As it happens, Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 comedy “Mon crime” has twice been adapted into Hollywood screwball romps: 1937’s Carole Lombard vehicle “True Confession” and the lesser 1946 remake “Cross My Heart,” starring Betty Hutton.
