Emmanuelle Devos stars as a grieving mother who becomes obsessed with finding the driver who killed her young son in a hit-and-run accident in this mystery with an edge of revenge drama. Set in sister towns that lie just a ferry ride across Lake Geneva, the film opens with Diane (Devos) walking out of a sanitarium and leaving her home in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the French spa town of Évian, where she looks for the mocha-colored car driven by a blond woman who was described by the sole witness to the accident. Adopting a false name, she befriends the car's owner Marlène (Nathalie Baye), a middle-aged beautician with her own salon, and she gets close to both the woman's younger boyfriend and her angry, uncommunicative teenage daughter. Adapted from the titular 2009 novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Moka is as much a character drama as a thriller, charting the strains on Diane as she starts to like her suspect, and the pressures on Marlène as an older woman struggling to hold together both a business and a personal life. Director Frédéric Mermoud creates slow-burning tension that builds to a satisfying emotional climax, and the film features superb performances from Devos and Baye. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)
Moka
Film Movement, 90 min., in French w/English subtitles, not rated, DVD: $24.99 Volume 33, Issue 1
Moka
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