7 - Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) 2011

The original title of this French mystery thriller is recognizable to any Marilyn Monroe fan. “Poupoupidou” is the last word of her Some Like It Hot rendition of “I Want to Be Loved by You.”

The film begins with a montage of Marilyn (we are to assume) doing her famous photographs with scarves near the time of her death. A woman in voice-over suggests she is going back before the womb to a previous life.

Cut to a blue-eyed scruffy mystery writer (Jean-Paul Rouve) driving in the snow in western France. He stops to listen to music beside a sign which says “Welcome to Mouthe, Candice Lecoeur’s Hometown” and a Marilyn look-alike smiling hello. David Rousseau, the writer, has come to learn of his inheritance from a distant aunt. She leaves her stuffed dog Toby which he discards. As Rousseau leaves town, he sees the blonde Candice’s body being collected by the local police. One of the patrolman is seen weeping.

Rousseau takes a room in Mouthe’s Snowflake Hotel, Room 5. We learn he is a book writer of novels like James McElroy and that Candice, who starred in cheese commercials for Belle de Jura cheese was a local celebrity.  The official story is that Candice took an overdose of sleeping pills and died in the snow in No Man’s Land at the Franco-Swiss border, so no investigate will be done.

Needing a novel plotline and intrigued by her death, Rousseau goes to the scene of her death. There he meets Bruno Leloup (Guillaume Gouix), the patrolman who was crying. Rousseau tells him he has acute hearing and shows it by hearing a rabbit struggling in a trap.

Told to leave off with his investigation, Rousseau instead goes to the local morgue and tricks his way into seeing the Candice’s body. Inspired by his No. 5 room key, he looks in No. 5 locker where he finds the girl. In a voice-over she talks about how if she’d met someone like him she might be there lying on a metal slab.

Seeing a bruise by her eye and a needle-mark on her arm, he is discovered and ends up in the Captain’s office where he is once again warned off.

Eventually Rousseau ends up in Candice’s home (a former candy factory) where he breaks in, finds all her diaries except for the most recent. Gradually he begins reading the diaries, befriends Bruno, and learns that Candice was so like Marilyn, much of her life seems to parallel—she too was married to sports figure, in love with a writer, had an affair with a local American raised president, and relied heavily on a psychiatrist who gave her drugs to handle her success. From the shrink we learn that Candice believed in reincarnation and believed she was Marilyn in a previous life.

As with any mystery, the enjoyment of the film rests with the gradual discovery of the key elements to the mystery and the people involved. The relationship between Rousseau (totally obsessed with the cheese girl) and Bruno (who seems as obsessed with Rousseau). We first assume Bruno was in love with Candice but eventually he says he wants to help Rousseau to hone his skills of detective work. The fact that Bruno is gay is only very subtly revealed during the investigation.

Director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu gives us lots of snow shots—the vast whiteness against a sound-track of a modern version of “California Dreamin,” or  white on white scenes with grey forests and occasionally Rousseau’s orange winter coat standing out. Candice refers to Mouthe as her hell where she was trapped.

Watching the film play with Marilyn and Candice’s history keeps our interest. Some things are never feel satisfactorily explained. Although we’re told the significance of the symbol 5 (it is the room where Marilyn and Kennedy met and had sex), the context makes it feel less significant than the filmmaker wants us to see. Or Candice’s voice-overs. adding her into the point of view—in my mind—just kind of muddies the film. For me, in the long run, it doesn’t matter because the mystery and the story are compelling enough as is.

There is a fascination of objects and as with any mystery we have to assign meaning to them all.

Guiox and Rouvie are generally more compelling actors than Sophie Quinton as Martine Langevin, aka Candice Lecoeur who is not given much depth to delve.

Even as we know that historical life of Marilyn, the film offers a different scenario to its basic premise.  The film is worth seeing.

Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou). ****

on Netflix