Möbius

The Möbius strip is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component.  One could travel from one point around both surfaces without crossing an edge to come back to the starting point.

What this has to do with Writer/Director Eric Rochant’s film Möbius is, perhaps, easier to discern if you are a mathematician.

Möbius is a spy-thriller in which my favorite French actress Cécile de France (Avenue Montaigne, Hereafter) plays Alice, a brilliant, but disgraced derivative trader, whose one mistake destroyed Lehman Brothers and helped bring about the global economic crisis.  Banished from the U.S., she is now working for a Russian bank in Monaco and is actually a spy for the CIA, assigned to help take down a corrupt Russian businessman played by a buff Tim Roth.

Alice is approached by the Russian FSB (the reinvented KGB) to work for them to do the very same thing and the CIA sees this as an opportunity to develop a mole in the FSB.

 

Here’s the problem…  When you start the film with characters speaking financial jargon in French, English and Russian, without knowing who is on what side and have the FSB giving Cécile’s character a code name and referring to her, for some unknown reason, as if she were a man, the audience is setup for confusion and it takes quite some time to figure out what the hell is going on.

The film is saved, however, by Jean Dujardin (The Artist), whose character is the chief of the FSB group assigned to cover Alice.  Not knowing who he is, she hits on him in a bar and, against orders not to get involved with her, he succumbs.  Their resulting affair takes over the film and we soon don’t care about understanding the rest of the plot. 

Cécile and Jean are both excellent to watch and Tim Roth and Aleksey Gorbunov, who plays his head of security, add to the fun.   

I give Möbius a 3+ out of 5, but Cécile and Jean get a 4+.

Note that the film was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival and does not yet have a U.S. release date.