My French dream is Guillaume Canet.

To dream in French would be to dream in his arms.

When I read the French section of instruction manuals, I think of him.

Sigh…

I fucking love this couple. I would do them both.

Canet, star of my favorite movie of all time, Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d’Enfants for you French speakers) and “companion” to Marion Cotillard since 2007, is such a heartthrob. He’s not that big in the U.S., though he did play that French guy in The Beach, but in France he is one of the most-highly sought-after personalities in film. Writer, director, actor, producer, editor, and HOTTIE! Unfortunately this means that if he and Cotillard ever split (And this would make me really sad, because I like her a lot.), I’d have to compete with thousands of other women who have the unfair advantages of living in France and actually speaking French to try to get his attention, love, and devotion.

Sigh…

Anyway, in my favorite Canet films, there’re some crazy situations of happenstance. Story lines cross and you have to constantly re-process information during the film in order to keep up, plus usually discuss the film afterwards with people so you can straighten out what you just witnessed. Tell No One is an awesome film in that way. It has a tight script (Because my Guillaumezie wrote it!) with very smart plot twists and revealings. If you like crime capers of the unpredictable kind, you’ll like Tell No One.

But that’s not what I want to talk about now. The fact that it plays in the U.S. is testimony enough of the film having reached some high degree of translatable standards. I think the most compelling part of Tell No One is the sheer existence of Kristin Scott Thomas’ role.

Scott Thomas is a familiar face in both American and European cinema. She’s a very beautiful and handsome woman, the kind whose features emanate maturity and kindness. (She was in The English Patient, but I’ve actually never seen that.) She seems like your quintessential elegant, esteemed leading lady.

In Tell No One, she plays the lesbian partner of the protagonist’s sister. She plays the lesbian partner of the protagonist’s sister.

She plays the lesbian partner of the protagonist’s sister, and it is not construed as strange or out of the ordinary. In the opening shot, she is smoking at the head of a picnic table, a position typically reserved for male heads of households. She has a close relationship with the protagonist and helps him in his times of need. They meet once in the cafe that she owns, and she stares for a significant amount of time at the ass of her waitress. Later on in the film, she and the protagonist are discussing their troubles, and she says of her partner’s jealousy (the protagonist’s sister), “She thinks I’m banging the waitress.”

I’m not sure simple words communicate what a significant thing this is. Scott Thomas’ role as Helene is unquestionably important and unquestionnable in itself. After the film I set some time aside to think, and I was so refreshed to keep coming back to the realization that the role of Helene was treated as androgynous. An androgynous character, one with multiple layers! An androgynous character, and not because it’s some melodramatic Oxygen network biopic on the life of an androgynous teen coming of age.

Perhaps when Tell No One debuted in Belgium in 2006, this was no big deal to them. To me, it’s monumental.

The storytellers of films, the screenwriters, usually have a character set clearly in mind when they craft their works. It’s a standard process to create a character bio for the people (and things) populating your scenes. Depending on the story, it’s a writer’s job to get down the key characters of personality and person as is essential to the story. Sometimes it’s important to define their occupations, sometimes it’s important to define their ages, and it’s usually a given that it’s important to define their genders. But imagine, for a second, that Guillaumezie and co-writer Harlan Coben wrote these character bios without any intentional gender.

That’s a big step. To envision a person without envisioning their gender. By just spelling out the qualities of their character. That is some MLK, Jr. shit! Could it translate to colorblindness in future scripts? I think it’s awesome. It’s not going to work for every story or every writer, and I don’t even know if such provocation of thought was the intention of the Tell No One writers, but I think it’s a technique worth looking into for future projects.

People keep yammerin’ about 18 million cracks in the ceiling. That glass won’t break til the storytellers (and history writers) start thinking like this.

Update: Dorkalicious has informed me (And I really should have checked this first. Bad pretentious blogger, bad!) that Tell No One is a novel originally written by Harlan Coben. Now I need to go read it. And you should, too.