Director Guillaume Canet’s sophomore effort resonates beautifully onscreen for its purposed inclusion within a rich lineage of French-on-American policiers. It combines the former’s predilection for hip pastiche with the latter’s laconic and laissez-faire glorification of gangsterism in all of its forms. From American expat Jules Dassin’s 1955 film noir Rififi to Michel Gast’s 1959 American expose I Spit on Your Grave (aka J’irai cracher dur vos tombes) to Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl (Le Cri du hibou) – a 1988 adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith mystery – these instances of Franco/American symbiosis have become central to the development of the arthouse crime picture.

Bracket for a moment the overarching influence of American gangster and noir films on every French director from Melville to Godard to Moullet. Canet’s contribution is fascinating for its attempt to transpose an “American” novel by Harlan Coben – set in American cities with American characters – into some kind of believable French analogue. Like Rififi, I Spit on Your Grave andCry of the Owl, Tell No One is as about translation as much as it is about crime. Can a New York murder yarn relocate to Paris with equal consequences? Do the regal but dour avenues of the Right Bank filmed by Canet equal the frantic pretensions of the Upper West Side as narrated by Coben? Similarly, when the action shifts to the underworld, does the largely gentrified community in Harlem seem at all analogous to the socio-political chaos currently engulfing the Parisian banlieue?

This question of translation is not simply an academic thesis on “cultural” exchange or heritage. It's also an examination of each country's film industry. Many critics were quick to point out, quite accurately, that much of Tell No One’s plot resembled – in its use of the man-on-the-run device and various byzantine conspiracies undergirding the action – the story of The Fugitive. Had Tell No One been produced by an American studio, it would have been stripped of its sentiment, suspense, and silences, becoming yet another television series remake. Imagine, for a moment, Harrison Ford’s Doctor Richard Kimball nursing his drunken ennui to Jeff Buckley’s “Lilac Wine,” or engaging in a naked frolic amid countryside rhododendron, as does Cluzet’s Doctor Beck. These moments of divigation, of excess, are rare in the American version of the crime film. They are stoppages or resistances to narrative momentum – the supposed central attribute of the genre. According to interviews with Tell No One author Coben, that is the reasont he rejected an ongoing American adaptation and, instead, elected to sign on with Canet and French producers.

Alternatively, some might question Canet’s use of "artistic" pretensions throughout Tell No One, finding them merely decorous and without substance. Several flashbacks of Alexandre and Margot as childhood sweathearts and a rather mawkish crosscutting between the couple’s wedding and Margot’s funeral do have an air of dramatic weightedness that rarely creeps into contemporary crime films. But they are hardly anamolous when compared to the brooding character studies of Jean-Pierre Melville, or to Godard’s early '60s images of the criminal-poet.

With all of these concerns at play, Tell No One proceeds to play with our expectations. Like Cluzet’s Doctor Beck, Canet evades a verdict by consistently running ahead of us and leaving false clues. His cinema becomes one of palimpsest, superimposing one language over another until both are indistinguishable. So while Tell No One is a beautiful homage to the French/American policier, it is precisely in the execution of the genre that Canet is able to establish his own translation.