If anyone's considering a remake of Polanski's Repulsion, and looking for someone to play the Catherine Deneuve role - well, call off the search. Nineteen-year-old Déborah François can be the only candidate. Having given a tremendous, understated performance in the Dardennes brothers' award-winning realist drama L'Enfant, she is now sensational as the sociopathic blonde in this deliciously elegant and very French psychological thriller, written and directed by Denis Dercourt.

Running at just over 80 minutes, it is a meticulously controlled piece from which every ounce of fat has been trimmed. The tense interplay of emotions is exerted through glances and gestures; the violence beneath is merely hinted at, and finds overt expression just once, in which the stiletto-point of a cello stand is used with shocking malevolence.

François is dangerously demure in the role of Mélanie, a beautiful young woman who has been damaged by an incident in her childhood, recounted in the movie's opening act. At 10 years old, Mélanie is a brilliant student of the piano, the daughter of humble parents who run a butchers' shop: itself a veiled narrative promise of brutality. Little Mélanie is proud, even haughty in her preparation for the Conservatory entrance exam: if she does not pass, Mélanie coldly informs her fond parents, then she will abandon her studies. While Mélanie is playing her audition piece, the visiting examiner Ariane Fourchécourt (Catherine Frot), a renowned concert pianist, arrogantly signs an autograph for an admirer, and the noise puts Mélanie off her stroke. She fails.

Years later, Mélanie gets a post in the household of a wealthy lawyer, looking after his young son, and discovers that the boy's mother is Ariane, now a diminished figure after a recent car accident, suffering from anxiety and stage fright. She ingratiates herself with her new mistress, who of course does not recognise the young woman, and offers to be Ariane's page-turner on the concert platform for a vital comeback performance. Ariane takes a shine to this wonderfully submissive and delectable assistant with her intelligent appreciation of music; Mélanie soon becomes indispensable to her, and she also takes it upon herself to instruct Ariane's young son in his own piano studies. But this page-turner, who has nursed resentment all these years, has a secret plan to destroy Ariane.

Revenge is a dish which must be served cold and Dercourt gives us an exquisitely refrigerated drama in the manner of Chabrol, or perhaps Joseph Losey's The Servant. The discipline of classical piano is a very appropriate dramatic vehicle for tension and for suppressed emotion. Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher converted this into explicit horror and violence; Dercourt's expression is implicit only, but I think there is a distinct resemblance between François and a younger Isabelle Huppert, who, in her freckly hauteur, often looks like a disdainful little girl. And of course in François's eyes there is a flash of the malign obsession to be glimpsed in those of Deneuve in the final shot of Repulsion.

Manipulative, serenely playful and enigmatic, Déborah François dominates the screen by doing little or nothing. It is a very mature, even worldly performance from François, who has shown a poise completely different from the poverty-stricken teen mother in L'Enfant. It may be that she had to be intensively rehearsed by Dercourt to achieve this effect, but I think rather that it came naturally, and Dercourt had merely to point the camera. François chillingly suggests not merely resentment at being in the demeaning position of page-turner - when concert glory should, by rights, have been hers - and elaborately concealed class rage at what is essentially a below-stairs position, but a luxurious indulgence in her sense of grievance: a black flower of hate that she has secretly cultivated. And always with icy self-control. Catherine Frot too is excellent as the pianist, bowed down by the demands of her vocation, by the precarious burden of stardom, and by her hidden loneliness, which Mélanie ruthlessly exploits.

Mélanie's revenge is a brilliantly twisted sort of psychotherapy: a revisiting of the traumas of the past, with a view to getting closure. It's a satiric illumination of the fact that slights and cruelties we receive as children live with us much more vividly than the blows of adulthood, and however sinister her behaviour, Mélanie is acting out the fantasies of all avowedly rational people who have entertained, however fleetingly, the reverie of travelling back in time to confront the tormentors of the past. A treat for lovers of intelligent cinema.

The 42-year-old French director of 'The Page Turner' speaks to Trevor Johnston, Nov 3 2006

It isn't an exaggeration to say there's no other filmmaker quite like Denis Dercourt, for the simple reason that he's also an accomplished classical musician, whose day job is teaching the viola at the Conservatoire Nationale in Strasbourg. This goes some way to explaining why his elegant new thriller The Page Turner gets inside the skin of these emotionally fragile musical athletes more persuasively than anything since Haneke's The Piano Teacher.

Dercourt's subtle way with psychological suspense makes this a very different proposition however, as personal assistant Déborah François calmly goes about destroying the life of neurotic piano virtuoso Catherine Frot, the latter blithely unaware that she'd once caused her new page-turner to flunk out in a key audition during her childhood, effectively dashing her hopes of winning a musical scholarship. For one of these women, it's a barely remembered blip, for the other the source of long-simmering revenge.
'I sometimes feel like an entomologist studying these very special insects,' reckons Dercourt of the milieu he knows so well, 'but I don't really think the subject of this film is music. There are, however, a lot of metaphors in the classical music world that you can apply elsewhere. In every job, for instance, we have struggle, passion, disappointment, but in this particular enclave, it's heightened because we begin so young. And the whole idea of suffering injustice in childhood is so universal, everyone can understand the desire for revenge. Thankfully, we don't all act on it, otherwise humanity would descend to the bestial, so even though Déborah's character is perhaps carrying this out on our behalf, we still understand that there's some frightening moral absence in her.'

Sold all over the world after its debut at Cannes this year, and already a sleeper hit across France, The Page Turner has put Dercourt firmly on the celluloid map, though he shot his first feature The Music Freelancers (which also had a brief London run) as far back as 1999. Having dabbled in Super 8 since childhood, before graduating to shorts and forming a production company - Les Films à un Dollar - with his brother Tom, he's sustained a remarkable twin-track career ever since. 'In France, we have a lot of holidays, especially if you're a teacher!' jokes the 42-year-old Parisian. 'Working in film can be very stressful, so it's great to have this oasis of calm to step back into. I definitely want to continue working this way.'

Not surprisingly, he's swift to point out the parallels between his two fields of endeavour, especially when it comes to making a film like The Page Turner, which takes elements of the thriller genre and startlingly weaves them into the minutely observed world of the chamber musician, with its fraught rehearsals and the tension of mastering Schubert and Shostakovich. 'It's a first time for me to make a film like this, and in a way it was like writing a fugue, something very codified. There are structures you have to obey, certain requirements for violence, fear, laughter - but not too much laughter! Of course, Hitchcock the great master realised that the best way to get hold of the audience was humour. It's like a magic formula: tension, laughter, increased tension. It works wonderfully well on screen when you bring it off, and of course it's a very musical structure too. After all, tension and release is the basic organising principle of Western musical expression.'

Although many critics have surmised the shadow of Chabrol on the film's social background and class tensions, Dercourt himself claims Minimalist music and painting as more of an influence on the subtle gradation of its controlled emotions, not to mention the aesthetic impact of a cultural-exchange spent in an exquisite villa among the temples of Kyoto. 'The thing about Japan,' he reflects of his six-month stay, 'is that everything you see, whether it's landscape or architecture, is somehow framed for viewing. There's a sense of constraint in the culture, which somehow also feeds into a lot of stories based on revenge. I'd be watching Noh plays, understanding very little, and with all the Japanese people around me dozing off, but I did take from it the idea of 'ma', the pause which creates tension in everything around it.

'That goes for the cinema as well, where stillness can intensify anticipation if you've already laid the groundwork for it. We know from the opening scene in The Page Turner that there's something potentially dangerous about the little girl who grows up into the Déborah François character. So the actress can be in the middle of the frame, apparently doing nothing, yet it's scary. As a performer, she's emptied herself, so we the audience can project our emotions into that space. It's that unique moment of identification.