"Just Wild About 'Harry'"
by Scott Mantz

"With a Friend Like Harry..."
Sergi Lopez,
Laurent Lucas
Directed by Dominik Moll

Fatal Attraction! Sergi Lopez becomes obsessed with Laurent Lucas in "With a Friend Like Harry..."

Maybe you haven't noticed, but quality movies these days are hard to come by. In fact, other than "Bridget Jones's Diary," "Memento," and "The Dish," I can't remember the last time I saw a movie that I didn't forget about once I left the theater.

Maybe I've been looking in the wrong place, because when the major cineplexes fails to deliver the goods, you can always count on the art house theaters to pick up the ball. That's certainly the case with the creepy French import "With a Friend Like Harry...," a suspenseful, riveting, and somewhat disturbing thriller that's sure to make you think twice before getting reacquainted with old friends.

While en route to his mountain retreat with his nagging family, Michel (Laurent Lucas) stops at a rest area and bumps into Harry (Sergi Lopez), an old school chum he hasn't seen in over 20 years. Harry intrusively invites himself to spend the night with Michel's family, but the first of many red flags are raised when Harry not only recites a poem that Michel wrote a long time ago, but he also buys Michel a brand new 4X4 to replace his broken down car. By the time Michel realizes that Harry has overstayed his welcome, he'll be lucky if he and his family get rid of him with their lives intact.

Everything about "With a Friend Like Harry..." screams of Hitchcock, right down to the Bernard Hermann-inspired musical score. French director Dominik Moll doesn't waste any time making you feel uncomfortable, and he keeps you on the edge of your seat squirming with hypnotic fear. Before Harry even enters the picture, you can't help but feel Michel's pain while he tries to keep his sanity amidst the chaotic and claustrophobic environment of family life.

When Harry does make his grand entrance--in the men's room, of all places--he turns out to be the exact opposite of everything that Michel represents. Where Michel is tired and tattered by so-called domestic "bliss," Harry seems perfectly stable and in control of his own destiny. As it is, Michel is so preoccupied with trying to please his family, including his smothering parents, that he can't see trouble when it's literally staring him in the face. Eventually, Harry's motto of "solve every problem" becomes too much for Michel to bear in a way that recalls Jim Carrey from "The Cable Guy," only without the sense of humor.

As Harry, Sergi Lopez is simply brilliant. As prim and proper as he appears to be on the outside, Lopez drops hints almost immediately that he's not quite all there. He's too good to be true, and his fascination with his old acquaintance takes on an almost homo-erotic obsessiveness as he walks the fine line between being irresistibly charming and unappealingly overbearing. Conversely, Laurent Lucas puts in an all-too-real performance as Michel and portrays him as a man who is so trapped by his family that he's lost touch with who he really is. It's a trap that many people fall into, and director Moll uses this ploy as a way of dragging the audience in even further.

"With a Friend Like Harry..." certainly digs deep enough to be a completely engrossing moviegoing experience, but it still ends on a relatively weak note that doesn't completely wrap things up. Then again, maybe that was the whole point. In his quest to bring out the best in Michel, Harry ends up proving that friendship, like blood, is thicker than water.

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