Wonderful character development!

Excellent but underrated film

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

French director and writer Michel Spinosa's third feature film tells the story about librarian Anna M. who's quiet life with her mother in Paris takes an irreversible turn when she meets a doctor and immediately arises an obsessive infatuation for him.This French psychological thriller written and directed by Michel Spinosa is an efficient fable about the dark and delusional aspects of love, which has one of the most convincing portrayals of a femme fatale since Glenn Close in Adrian Lyne's "Fatal Attraction" (1987). Continuously examining the protagonist on her devoted crusade towards a man she has convinced herself to be the one and only object of her affection, Michel Spinosa creates a suspenseful study of character which is one of the finest amongst the numerous films dealing with the theme of obsessive love. The direction is on point, the dialog is well written, the music and the enigmatic atmosphere is pivotal and Isabelle Carre's performance as an uncompromising femme fatale who renounces everything for an illusion of love in this character-driven drama, is sterling.

I'll have to admit that French movies have come a long way since the 60s and 70s, a period during which vastly overrated - but occasionally barely competent - filmmakers such as Godard, Bunuel, and Rohmer bombarded the viewers with plot-less, overly political, and usually pretentious easy-to-make, pointless, free-for-subjective-interpretation, fill-in-the-meaning-yourself baloney. France is still the source of many dumb films (but, hey, so is Hollywood), yet the direction has become far more skillful, and French editors have finally left the unemployment lines and started being hired to do their (underrated) jobs. Many of the older French flicks look as if ALL the scenes that were shot were stuck into the end-product...ANNA M isn't exactly the first movie to deal either with insanity or stalkers, but it's one of the better ones. This is due in large part to Isabelle Carre's charisma and her ability to pull off an ideal, gradual schizophrenic jump from the likable, naive young spinster to the malicious, tunnel-vision-obsessed loon.The only significant drawbacks can be found around the middle, when the movie drifts slightly into far-fetched territory: the whole nonsense about no-one in the police believing the doctor went into overkill drive for a short while there...The ending is somewhat problematic. The birth of her child "cures" her, calms her down: I don't buy that.

I recently saw this at the 2008 Palm springs International Film Festival. This is the story of Anna M (Isabelle Carré), a young and lovely manuscript restorer at the national library in Paris, who develops a fatal attraction to the handsome married Dr. Andre Zanevsky (Gilbert Melki). Anna one day decides to commit suicide by walking into oncoming traffic and is severely injured as a result of being struck by car. While hospitalized she develops a crush on her doctor which upon her release develops into a dangerous delusional disorder called erotomania where she believes the doctor is deeply in love with her which leads to her pursuit and harassment and stalking of him. The film divided into four chapters which represent the four stage of erotomania, Illumination, Hope, Disappointment and Hatred. The four chapters may also represent the film goers four stages of experiencing this film. The premise of the film's story is good and full of possibilities but it ultimately becomes so far-fetched and implausible that it never delivers as either a psychological thriller or a study into mental illness. The doctor can never convince the police that this woman represents a dangerous threat to he and his wife. He is after all a respected surgeon and Anna M. is a woman with a history of mental illness. She just tried to kill herself and at one point in the film her mother recognizes that Anna is losing her grip on reality and comments that "it's happening again" so she must have a history of mental instability even before the attempted suicide. She simply resumes her life after the suicide attempt and as she escalates her harassment of Zanevsky and his wife the police take Anna's side. Anna gets a job as a nanny for tow young girls in the apartment above the Zanevsky's without any references or background checks or employment resumé and immediately begins her final stage of stalking the doctor from her on site vantage point. Carré plays the role in such a one-dimensional way that you are left not really caring about the character and would just like to see her locked up somewhere for along time getting the help she needs. The ending is so ambiguous that you don't know if she's dreaming it up or not and is certainly an unsatisfactory conclusion to the story. Michel Spinosa writes and directs this film that looks good and has a lot of possibilities but falls short. I would give this a 6.0 out of 10.

... should not unwatched go. Shakespeare came up with that line some 400 years ago yet he might have been referring to Isabelle Carre's tour de force in this movie. Carre IS without doubt a Great actress and seems to have made a speciality out of sickness; her portrait of a young woman stricken with Alzheimer's in Zabou Breitman's Se Souvenirs des belles choses was unforgettable and it would have been unthinkable had any other actress copped the Best Actress Cesar that year. In Anna M she does it again but this time without the self-awareness of her character in Se Souvenirs. Okay, we can't drag the story into a strong light less the flaws hit us in the face - for example a woman like Anna would never in a million years secure a job as a nanny to two young girls seemingly without a single reference and based on a five minute interview, nor would a locksmith be prepared to break into an apartment on the say so of a barely plausible young woman claiming to live there. We're prepared to overlook this sloppy writing solely because the performance of Carre IS so towering, so majestic.We know that Americans don't do irony but can we, I wonder, say as much for the French; in A la folle ... pas de tout Isabelle Carre played the wife of doctor Samuel L Bihan who was stalked by a deranged Audrey Tautou, convinced he was in love with her; in Anna M Carre plays the stalker and Anne Consigny has Carre's old role as doctor Gilbert Melki's innocent wife. The films even share a final moment when in each case the seemingly 'cured' leading lady shows the audience that this is far from the case. Tautou is, of course, a fine actress but Carre is a Great one who gives a ten out of ten performance here, only the sloppy plotting mentioned above drags the rating to nine out of ten.