The Page Turner is a perfectly serviceable psychological thriller of the Chabrol school, with a promising but eventually half-hearted attempt at exploring class vengeance (the credits crosscut between work at a butcher shop with the female protagonist practicing on the piano!). The story focuses on people’s reliance on the social support given to one another almost unconsciously simply by behaving normally. From a single, perhaps acharacteristic moment of supremely inappropriate (and here, interestingly, dramatically unrealistic,) behavior a young woman, Mélanie, is traumatized as a young girl during a piano recital when a famed pianist, Ariane (Catherine Frot), interrupts the girl’s performance. Ably directed by Dercourt with half-moments of empty frames, eerie steadicam gestures, and decent foreground/background visual menace, and finely acted by Frot, the film unfortunately offers no real exploration of the way an older Mélanie (Déborah François) later makes Ariane so psychologically reliant on her. Leaping quickly from being an intern to Ariane’s husband, to an au pair of the couple’s child, Mélanie makes the final jump to being Ariane’s page turner, a fascinating role of some importance in Ariane’s life, acting as a silent, socially invisible support to the fragile concert pianist. This is a brilliant idea, as it is based on the subtle, generally unnoticed reliance people have on those who help them, even in the smallest things, and how normalized behavior is something that seems innocuous and unimportant until the veneer of that normality is broken. From this comes The Page Turner’s bare attempt at class critique, as Ariane’s upper-class reliance on the lower-class Mélanie segues smoothly from the girl taking care of Ariane's child, cooking meals, and turning pages, to an attachment that goes beyond that—an almost all-encompassing reliance of Mélanie's presence in her life. But the psychology of the vindictive girl is painfully thin, and the film fails to fully envision the nature of the growth of Ariane’s dependence on the girl. Dercourt is not interested enough in the formal aesthetics of his film to place their exploration of the scenario at the fore-front, and since the situation itself is not as fine-tuned as it could be one searches in Frot's character, who the film shifts focus to after Mélanie enters her household, for insight into her fragility and outreach to dependence, which, while beautifully expressed, is simply there as an accepted fact. Finding that unsatisfactory, one looks at Mélanie for a character that exists as a person, as a member of a class, as someone with a past (the film starts when she is a girl, traumatized by Ariane’s behavior), as someone with a plan (strangely, instead of a nefarious plot, Mélanie instead continually falls into a position for Ariane to rely on her), as anything more than her one-dimensional fixation, but the script by Decourt and Jacques Sotty emphasizes plot over such details. The Page Turner ends up being a typically French psychological thriller with a pretense towards exploring social structure (superficially in terms of class, but more directly in terms of support systems and psychological cues taken from everyday behavior), but despite its very promising narrative motifs the film fails to push any of them beyond their use as plot mechanics.