Möbius (2013)

Wonderful Movie

the audience applauded

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It doesn't happen often, but once in a while, it's possible for a film to be both under- and over-cooked at the same time. Writer-director Eric Rochant's Möbius is a case in point. The double-crossed romance at its heart flirts with being fascinating but doesn't quite get there, buried as it is within the conspiracy-laden, high-stakes world of big business and covert intelligence.While monitoring the offshore activities of crooked Russian tycoon Ivan Rostrovsky (Tim Roth), Russian secret agent Gregory Lioubov (Jean Dujardin) talent-spots Alice Redmond (Cecile De France), a brilliant international banker so spectacular she was banned from working in America after the Lehman Bros scandal. Not realising that Alice is already working with the CIA, Gregory directs his team to recruit and use her to get closer to Rostrovsky. Inevitably, secrets and conspiracies pile up, with Gregory only complicating matters when he stumbles into a forbidden relationship with Alice.There are a few moments and ideas that shine through Möbius, no doubt the ones that most inspired Rochant to construct a script around them. These come mainly in the relationship between Alice and Gregory – or Moses, as she knows him. Their connection is under-written, suggested more through soul-shuddering orgasms than what is technically in the script. Nevertheless, Dujardin and de France just about make it work, whether Gregory is brazenly deceiving his colleagues to answer a call from Alice or they're sharing a final, quietly devastating scene together.But their efforts are let down by an overly complicated plot, one that feels as if it doesn't make much sense even when all is revealed. The motivations of every agency involved are murky at best. The CIA comes off the worst, its agents lurking stupidly through a handful of scenes as their ties with Alice ebb and flow in quite mysterious fashion. The Americans in the cast must also grapple with the unwieldy, soapy chunks of dialogue they're given. As a result, the film loses steam when it should gain tension.A Möbius strip, as a character explains quite late in the film, is a deceptively simple phenomenon. Half-twist a strip of paper, fasten the two ends together, et voila: something utterly simple rendered impossibly complicated – a never-ending loop, a two-dimensional model with only one surface. Rochant meant for the strip to be a metaphor for the dilemma in which his characters find themselves. It's rather appropriate, though perhaps not quite how he intended it, that the strip also serves as an apt metaphor for the entire film.

The story is mainly set in Monaco, where economy and national/international cabals intertwine. Alice (Cécile de France) works for a Russian Bank and as a mole for the CIA. Moïse's (Jean Dujardin) FSB (Russian Intelligence) Team recruits her without knowing her CIA-affiliation. CIA and FSB both want to get in on the bank's founder Rostovsky and his economic/criminal activities. In the thick of it, Moïse get's too close to Alice and falls in love with her. It gets more and more complicated, and in the end, Rostovsky is not that important anymore as the whole Monaco mission evolves to a standoff between CIA and FSB with the main characters as double/triple agents and lovers who betray each other unwillingly.Plot: Really interesting idea - a plot that one would envision as close to the real mechanism behind actual intelligence affairs (current whistle-blower affairs, Cold War affairs). If you are interested in spy affairs and you can live without action scenes, this is your movie. My rating of nine shows my enthusiasm.Below some further details, light spoilers and criticism.Script: Five minutes in, and one knows the parameters and the scenes keep rolling and rolling – every scene is important and adds something new.Only the sex scenes seemed to be out of rhythm, as enchanting as they were.The metaphor of the Möbius strip is fitting for the intrigues and the characters becoming double/triple (maybe even quadruple) agents. The scene in which the metaphor is laid out to the viewer is a bit clumsy (and it had to involve a corpulent CIA agent, weird). The scenes with Alice's father are a bit forced. All in all, the script is powerful, compact – really good.Actors: Cécile de France IS Alice – beautiful and strong-willed as the script describes her.Jean Dujardin is really good, always giving us a hint of a restless soul, a man adopted in his youth by the KGB. The scene of Alice's and Moïse's first face-to-face-encounter is an unbelievable good play of gazes. The atmosphere in the sex scenes created by the actors is wonderful.Tim Roth plays convincingly a Russian tycoon who imitates Cal Lightman from the TV show "Lie to Me". I like Tim Roth.Aleksey Gorbunov is a Russian mobster who accidentally stepped on the set and was cast as Rostovsky's security. Brilliant move from casting department!The other actors do a good job as intelligence officials and agents. Saïd is interesting. Maybe Émilie Dequenne as Russian agent does a bit too much to show the audience she knows of Alice's and Moïse's relation (but that could be also one of the few "mis-directions").Direction/photography: Beautiful images of Monaco, nice opening shot. Interesting angles. The murder scene in the elevator scene is almost the only action scene. The camera and direction underline the rawness and brutality and the "finishing move" is delivered in "Drive"-like coolness.Really good ideas of the director like the dry chase scenes which have a nice realistic touch.Sometimes the character's are on the edge of becoming caricatures and oppose the otherwise realistic approach to the story-line (mainly Gorbunov and Roth that fill their roles nearly too good (?).Apart from that, the direction/photography completed and sometimes even seemed to enhance the efforts of the actors (see first encounter of Alice and Moïse, sex scenes, interaction of the side characters).Music: Maybe a bit too much Don Cossack Choir (inspired) music. Several really good electronic beats that fit the drive of the movie (and also seem to be influenced by Winding Refn's movie "Drive").All in all, "Möbius" is a round package and gives the viewer a good time and something to think about.

Actress Cécile De France and Oscar Best Actor 2011 Winner Jean Dujardin both played in the French film "Möbius (2013)". Their love making scene in this film just looked so realistically beautiful. Cécile De France played the heroine who enjoyed sex to the extreme with her subtle facial reactions responding to every movement, while Jean Dujardin focused on her face silently yet so intensely. The scene played so serenely beautiful, showing the big difference from a bad porno film. The whole process from when he sat in the night club spotting her came in with Tim Roth, to she approached him after she spotted him looking at her, then to the sudden return after she left, then to the bar scene where they drank and talked, then to the bed making love. the whole segment was one of the best directed and performed what a good movie should and could be.By viewing this almost lifelike performance in an unreal visual drama, you would learn how really good actors could perform, especially those French actors.

That's the very first time since THREE BURIALS, back in 2005, that Europacorp Productions - Luc Besson's crap factory - give us such an interesting film. Of, course, many things are very hard to follow in this movie maybe not anyone could be pleased to watch without a little boredom. It deserves to be seen at least three or four times before getting the very unusual lines of this amazing feature. A tale of double cross, undercover mission, mixed with a romantic spy thriller topic. This movie also gives us a bitter sweet taste in the mouth. It could have been with more action sequences, although. But after all...The ending doesn't spoil the entire film. A good piece of work.