Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart

Director Cédric Anger, a former Cahiers du Cinéma critic, draws from official documents for this cool-eyed portrait of a real-life serial killer. Guillaume Canet, in a tightly-wound performance, plays Alain Lamare, here renamed Franck, a gendarme who stalked women in provincial France in the late 1970s. With his side-parted hair and predilection for driving at night, he looks for all the world like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and even shares character traits. As far as Franck is concerned, his victims deserve the harm he inflicts because they take risks such as hitchhiking and biking after dark. He hits one with his car and afterward writes an anonymous letter to the gendarmie, proclaiming, "I am a killer. And as such, I intend to kill." Relatively polite (although not exactly friendly) to the people in his life, he's surly to strangers, especially when drinking. His parents wonder why he's single, although he has little time for romance, what with all the ice baths, flagellation, and other forms of self-harm. Eventually, he warms up to his attractive laundress, Sophie (Ana Girardot), but the town's other women remain vulnerable. Sophie is also keeping a secret herself. Although there are several close calls, Franck keeps finding ways to evade detection until he discovers the limits of his cleverness. Despite the despicable nature of his crimes, Anger and Canet conspire to make Franck ever-so-slightly sympathetic, obfuscating rather than elucidating his pathology, which remains a mystery. Recommended. (K. Fennessy)