Woe to the working crime novelist; every vacation is a busman’s holiday. Through divine Murder She Wrote providence, wannabe James Ellroy type David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) happens to roll through the sublimely icy French town of Mouthe on the day its most beloved citizen is found dead in the snow. The deceased is stunningly gorgeous gas-station attendant-cum-model-cum-weathergirl Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton), who believed herself to be Marilyn Monroe reborn. She pops up in rhapsodic flashbacks and (only occasionally) narrates from beyond the grave via voiceover. Everybody thinks it was suicide, but David, of course, isn’t buying it. So he steals her dozens-large catalog of journals and starts digging into a life that, it turns out, is eerily Monroe-vian, what with all the pills and affairs and exploitation.
Originally titled Poupoupidou, Nobody Else But You is populated with unique bit players in oddball comic vignettes, but this isn’t quite the French Fargo it’s cracked up to be. Directer Gérald Hustache-Mathieu, who’s cast Quinton in everything he’s ever done, knows a thing or two about gorgeousness: Noir gloom, ripe sexiness and majestic arctic backdrops abound. But just when we’re about to overdose on charm, we find we’ve been murdered by cliché.
