The Interpreter

The key to a good thriller is in the genre title. If you don’t fulfil the thrill – where does it leave you? With something a little bit like The Interpreter, if you’re not careful. Although this is partially a political thriller, it should not be confused with the Nicole Kidman film of the same name. This is the unlikely result of a Russian/Swiss co-production and does little convince that the two countries should make a habit of becoming bedfellows.

The interpreter here, is Ira, an ingénue whom we meet toasting her dead father at her birthday party. She and mum have a pretty strained relationship, particularly because it was mummy dearest who uprooted Ira from her Russian homeland as a child to bring her up in Switzerland (as her mother puts it: “I wanted to offer her freedom but she couldn’t care less for my presents.”).

When an old pal of her mother’s, Oleg (Sergei Garmash), offers Ira the chance to work as a translator for a dodgy Russian businessman (Alexander Baluev) accused of drug dealing, she is initially resistant but – quite inexplicably, in the first of several plot swings that feel forced and unrealistic – changes her mind and so finds herself sucked into the workings of the court and the mob.

As a scenario, there is potential. By playing with the language of interpretation the audience is often let in on a secret of what has been said in Russian and able to compare it with what Ira actually reveals in translation - although this would, no doubt, work better if either Russian or French was your mother tongue, since the subtitles add another layer of work for the viewer.

There is a tensing and a flexing of relationships. Some are familial, between Ira and mum and, later, when she heads off for Russia fully intending to discover the truth about dad. Others, are romantic, although a sub-plot involving her falling for defence solicitor Mayard (Bruno Todeschini), for whom she translates, feels stitched on the side and lacks set-up.

Most of all there is Ira’s search for her own identity – but the film simply flits about too much to do this any justice. A cassette tape, which really should come to the fore since it holds a key place in the thriller plot, is reduced to little more than a macguffin to put her in the right place for an emotional revelation, at one point.

There is nothing wrong with the performances. Julia Batinova plays the confused twentysomething with a vulnerability and keeps her emotional gestures small and, therefore, more hard-hitting. In some ways, however, this is the problem, since the search for her identity works far better than the thriller aspect of the film, which seems to completely drop off the radar at one point. Oddly, once co-writer/director Elena Hazanov has, if you’ll pardon the pun, had enough of toying with Ira’s inner psyche, the thriller side of things begins to improve, but it’s all too little too late. Wrapping things up with a wordy courtroom scene only serves to underscore the lack of thrills in a package, which while interestingly shot, is trying too hard to be too many things simultaneously.