Denis Dercourt’s “The Page Turner” wants to be a suspenseful, sexy revenge tale but never quite delivers. The plot concerns a young woman, Mélanie, who seeks vengeance against the woman whom she blames for ending her career as a concert pianist before it even began. Within minutes all the elements are in place: the young Mélanie shows a slightly violent side after she is rejected, the older Mélanie pursues her quarry with robotic obsession, and soon enough she places herself in a position to do maximum harm to Ariane, the famous pianist who has apparently ruined Melanie’s life. Will she stop at ruining Ariane’s career? Or will she steal away Ariane’s husband? Murder Ariane? Take the life of her young son, lamblike Tristan? All of the film’s momentum comes from these questions, and with expert assuredness Dercourt keeps adding new ones that add subtle layering to the story.

The rub here is that the movie’s villian, Mélanie, sports an affectless, humorless, and decidedly un-crazy demeanor. Deborah Francois’ face has a soft, open beauty perfect for skin-cream ads, yet it is edged round with telling austerity: the conservative clothes, the tautly-drawn back hair, her spartan fastidiousness. At important moments in the film her expression freezes into a mask, the look of a girl chilling out all the way to absolute zero. It is a performance of uncanny hardness. Her features never break into storms of passion or fury. Without a small smile curling her lips at the end, it might even be uncertain that she wanted revenge at all.

In fact, the movie’s delicious ambiguity rests on just why she wanted to get so close to Ariane in the first place. Could a bizarre, self-hating love for Ariane have been her motive? But even the hint of sexual passion is muted, washed out. The kiss Mélanie gives Ariane in the movie’s creepiest, most surprising moment, features a toe-in-the-water pause at Ariane’s cheek before Mélanie dives into the lips. It seems less like a thawing-out of long-frozen lust and more like the determined effort of schoolgirl doing a clumsy stage kiss.

“The Page Turner” is built on such small moments that satisfy the demands of plot but add subtle ripples of ambiguity. What enjoyment there is mostly comes from trying to read Mélanie’s poker face. Francois’ icy performance is plenty mysterious, and she even manages to be drily funny. Poor Laurent, the cellist in Ariane’s trio, makes the mistake of enthusiastically groping Mélanie’s breasts after a rehearsal. As he works on her from behind, grunting like a fool, Mélanie slowly raises the cello, poised to jab its sharp spike downward into his foot. Dercourt shows us the spike slowly rising in the air, as if Mélanie were coolly drawing back the string on a bow before letting her bolt fly and sending Laurent into hopping howls of pain. The drawing back of the spike—the tightening of the bow, as it were—forms the pleasure of this sharp little scene. She’s no one to be trifled with.

This should have been the basic movement of the whole film—the long, slow plunge of the knife—but Mélanie’s poker face never cracks. The suspense starts to die out once it becomes apparent that the interesting wrinkle Dercourt has given the familiar revenge/obsession tale is that Mélanie’s personality isn’t so much deranged and monomaniacal as it is discomfitingly absent. She starts off as, and remains, a placeholder for a villain who never quite arrives. Mélanie's opacity makes her a memorable sociopath, but unfortunately it also denies the movie any darker psychology and leaves it adrift in shallow atmospherics.