Critic Reviews

The Crime is Mine is the epitome of a comfort film, decked out in old-Hollywood nostalgia and unfolding at an auctioneer’s clip. Its fun and games are deceptively smart — all the more because the women know their angles so triumphantly well.

Do yourself a favor and go see The Crime Is Mine, a delicious bit of French froth from master director François Ozon.

A willfully theatrical, proudly retro yet delectably pertinent confection.

Though not as risk-taking as his earlier work, François Ozon’s fanfic for the Jazz Age steers clear of pastiche and is utterly charming — throwing a few curveballs to keep you on your toes.

It draws on the giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago. But while its protagonists are as driven by a desire for fame and money as the amoral starlets of the Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse musical, the film has more than grinning cynicism at its core.

Ozon has a ball poking fun at a corrupt justice system that shuffles one criminal to the next crime-out-of-convenience and imagines how public opinion would fashion Madeleine into a feminist symbol.

Though it lacks a more exigent purpose, The Crime Is Mine has layers of textbook farce decorated with a confectioner’s critique. We rarely see such quaint delights in cinemas these days.

The Crime Is Mine has a borderline-cartoonish buoyancy. If it’s not as funny as it wants to be, that’s because most of the characters are given a single note to play. But they do it with irresistible gusto.

The movie is one of those pointed and prickly farces, like “8 Women” (2002) and “Potiche” (2011), that Ozon tends to scatter among his more solemn projects, as if to keep his comic hand in. The dramatis personae are boldly drawn and, let us say, broadly performed.

Tereszkiewicz and Marder delight as a double act, but it’s Huppert who steals the show with a cunning smile.