Dominik Moll’s first short film, made when he was an exchange student in New York, was an adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s story “The Blanket.” In it, a man’s sleep is disturbed by his belief that his blanket is trying to strangle him. Moll’s films continue to make the familiar strange, and the comforting threatening.
His new dark comedy thriller, With a Friend like Harry . . . , introduces an interloper into a family’s summer getaway home. The Harry of the title is a rich, affable high-school classmate of father Michel, a teacher in his 30s who’s struggling to provide for his brood. Michel’s parents are a bit too willing to lend a hand; the family arrive at their renovated farmhouse to discover that a gaudy pink bathroom has been installed, courtesy of the folks. Just as Michel is feeling the weight of his inadequacies, Harry, Harry’s Mercedes, and Harry’s sexy girlfriend drop into his life.
Yet it’s Harry who is in awe of Michel, reciting by heart a poem Michel had had published in the school literary magazine. Harry aims to rekindle Michel’s dream of becoming a writer — even if he has to use a blowtorch to do it. Comic moments depicting Michel’s humiliation in the face of Harry’s extravagant generosity take a turn for the sinister as Harry’s concern for Michel begins to recall the type of “help” proffered by the charming but amoral characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt.
Moll, who has a German father and a French mother, lived in Germany until age 19, then moved to Paris. He conceived of the story after having himself experienced the demands of fatherhood. For the screenplay, he worked with film-school chum Gilles Marchand (they wrote Moll’s first feature, Intimacy, which also dealt with a meddling friend). “It was like a game. I became Michel and Gilles became Harry. Harry wants to offer Michel a car, which I thought should be a normal car. Gilles said, ‘No, that’s not excessive enough for Harry. It has to be a four-wheel drive.’ I said, ‘No, if I was Michel, I could never accept that, it’s too vulgar.’ ” By the time the cameras rolled, that gift had become a blazing red SUV.
Moll received the César (France’s Oscar) as Best Director for this film, and Sergi Lopez was named Best Actor. “It was important that Harry should appear as somebody sympathetic,” Moll explains, “because everything he does, he does to help Michel. Sergi has that quality. In all the films he’s been in, he’s played nice guys from the beginning to the end. So when I met him, we worked on scenes where we start to see Harry’s madness, and Sergi was great. Physically, he has a strong and sexy quality that I don’t see in many French actors.”
And the aforementioned pink bathroom, which sticks out like a sore womb in the otherwise drab farmhouse? To Moll, it was “something that would nicely symbolize Michel’s parents’ intrusion into his life. It’s surreal. You’re almost inside Michel’s head when he’s in that bathroom, sitting on the toilet trying to write.
“At first we chose tiles that were more beige because we were afraid of being too flashy. But that was disappointing, so the painters had to go in and repaint the tiles that really bright pink.”
With a Friend like Harry . . . opens this Friday, April 27, at theaters to be announced.
