Review of Birgitt Haas Must Be Killed

....because I saw it dubbed (in English) and it definitely loses a lot of its impact. The dubbing for Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort's characters is decent, but Lisa Kreuzer has been given a thick German accent that renders about half of her dialogue indecipherable. Noiret plays a high-ranking French secret agent who plans to use down-and-out, unemployed, abandoned by his wife everyman Rochefort as the patsy in an assassination plot: the target is German nymphomaniac ex-terrorist Kreuzer! It's an interesting, though far-fetched premise (after all, the authorities already have an agent planted in an affair with Birgitt, why couldn't they have used him?), but the film mostly falls flat; Laurent Heynemann directs in a TV-movie style (and if you check IMDb you'll see that he did spend most of his career in television). The only sequence that works up some suspense comes after about 90 minutes! The performances by all three leads are fine, but, as I mentioned before, the English dubbing makes it hard to fully appreciate them. **1/2 out of 4.