Yet another overseas entry into the Marilyn Monroe cinema of fixation but not quite following in the footsteps of last year’s UK weepie My Week With Marilyn, Nobody Else But You is a post-mortem celeb noir that is not quite about Marilyn either. And rather than exclusively focusing on male-obsessive Monroe desires, French director Gerald Hustache-Mathieu burrows with mixed results via this identity crisis policier, into the psyche of a wannabe Marilyn woman.
Jean-Paul Rouve stars as David Rousseau, a frustrated crime novelist stricken with writers block, who gets hooked on a news story about a recently deceased provincial alpine French beauty queen, Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton). Rousseau hopes that this death ruled a suicide by drug overdose in a snow drift will somehow offer sinister elements to jump star his stalled career and currently dormant imagination, and indeed it does.
It seems that the locals may be concealing all sorts of conspiratorial schemes targeting the tragic Monroe subconscious impersonator, leading Rousseau to temporarily switch up his vocation to self-appointed gumshoe. And in a quite wacky town where the men may be as coincidentally reliving the events in Monroe’s life as much as the deluded faux Marilyn herself.
Which is where this pungently atmospheric investigative thriller loses its way. Suffering an identity crisis of its own as to whether the driving element is the crime story, a psychological inquiry into fame and female angst, or a just plain kooky excursion into outlandishly prophetic coincidences.
First Run Features
Unrated
2 stars
Trailer of Nobody Else But You:
