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(Harry, he's here to help (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien), Director: Dominik Moll, Distributor: Boomerang Pictures)
Melanie Klein's descriptions of primitive defences have been brought to life in this remarkable French film written by Dominik Moll and Gilles Marchand and directed by Dominik Moll. Winner of 4 Cesar Awards in 2001, it is a mystery thriller in the Hitchcockian tradition but with what seems to be a very ambiguous moral message. It is also more if you care to take a closer look. Rather it would be more correct to say: if you care to take a step back and assume an analytical stance. Primitive defences such as projective identification are like that. Move too close and you get swallowed up without realizing what is happening to you, but move too far away and you won't have a clue what's going on. In a very subtle yet, at the same time, terrifying way, we are shown how the defence mechanisms of splitting and projective identification can drain the personality of much instinctual energy, restricting sexual and aggressive drives and, with them, many creative elements. It shows how one may be ready to compromise and accept this situation rather than face the sometimes overwhelming anxiety involved in recuperating these elements which are felt to be much too threatening to the ego. Despite the very down to earth, realistic beginning of the film where external reality dominates, we slowly enter, without realizing it at first, into a more surreal world, the inner world of Michel, the main character of the film. Slowly and eerily, fantasy becomes reality but the audience, like Michel, is at first naïve, unaware of what is happening.
Michel is a French teacher. He has an attractive, understanding wife, Claire, and they are the parents of three small girls. They are worn out by the small but innumerable problems of everyday life. Michel is a ‘nice guy’, a man of compromise who tries to accommodate everyone in order to avoid conflict. A young man with much patien