Anything for Her [Pour elle] **** (2008, Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger, Lancelot Roch) – Classic Movie Review 3837

Bit by bit German star Diane Kruger has overcome her casting as just another pretty face as Helen in Troy back in 2004. Though her international breakthrough didn’t happen, she is still in the game, thanks to the National Treasure movies and her turn as a Marlene Dietrich-style movie star in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

And now, speaking French beautifully too, Kruger shines as a lovely youngish wife who is wrongly imprisoned for 20 years for the murder of her boss in a car-parking garage. Her fingerprints are on the murder weapon and the victim’s blood on her jacket, so she doesn’t have a chance of establishing her innocence.

Her mousy high school teacher husband Vincent Lindon is devastated, and has to look after their young son Oscar (Lancelot Roch) alone while fighting to get Kruger home. But, after three years of battling, all legal action to get her free has failed. His lawyer breaks the terrible news that his wife, who is now suicidal and refusing her insulin, can’t ever hope to win her freedom in the court of appeal.

In a final act of desperation, Lindon concocts the most outrageously daring plan to spring her from jail, with the help of an ex-con who has written books about his jailbreaks. The tension level rises to the roof as Lindon makes his arrangements, while not telling anyone what he’s up to.

Though it gets increasingly improbable, co-writer/director Fred Cavayé’s 2008 French thriller is a brilliantly done nailbiter. You desperately want Lindon to get Kruger out but you just never know if he can pull it off. Kruger is excellent, but the spotlight’s largely on the hubby who’ll do Anything for Her, and Lindon is just grand. There’s not an ounce of fat on a stupendous movie – the kind the French do so brilliantly.

It was remade as The Next Three Days (2010).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3837

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