Pre-release screened at major international festivals and the Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2007, The Page Turner/La Tourneuse de pages reflects director-writer Denis Dercourt’s parallel career as solo orchestral violinist and conservatory professor. The quiet eighty-five-minute revenge suspenser dances to the essentials of music in cadence, pauses, tension balanced against relaxation.

Hitchcockian in its twists, the story recalled Gene Tierney’s melodrama in Leave Her to Heaven for one viewer, and, though motivation is given early, The Bad Seed and The Other may spring to mind in the spookily childlike surface of adult Mèlanie Prouvost (Dèborah Francois), determined in her path and using her ice-queen allure yet at heart aloof from sex, as Laurent Chalter (Xavier de Guillebon) learns painfully in the film’s one laugh-provoking moment. Perhaps, too, someone might think  of something like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but this new movie  is distinguished from such a derivative shocker by its subtlety and effective camera framing.

Patient audiences will find rewards here in slow steady development supported by silences, shifting focal planes involving the two female leads, and uncluttered monochromatic wall and hall backdrops. The same sure understatement extends even to a few brief swimming-pool scenes which bear not unfavorable comparison to that of the classic Jacques Tourneur-Val Lewton Cat People. Without gimmicks or gore, threatening but above descending to standard scares, Dercourt builds his plausible, if at times opportunistic, settling of accounts.

Encouraged by her butcher parents (Jacques Bonnaffè, Christine Citti), nervous schoolgirl Mèlanie (Julie Richalet) lives for her piano and opens her conservatory admittance audition well enough. However, after the pianist chair of the five-member panel self-centeredly calls in an autograph-seeker, the young aspirant stops, loses confidence and concentration, and on resumption, initial nods of approval turn to negative headshakes. In a foreshadowing of her future character, she closes a piano on another player’s hands and, despite her parents’ talk of continuing lessons, puts away her music and Beethoven bust. Except for perfunctory cellphone calls of “everything’s fine,” M. and Mme. Prouvost disappear, along with their child’s dream.

Later, the grownup Mèlanie begins her efficient first day as database archivist in the prosperous law office of Jean Fouchècourt (Pascal Greggory), loving husband and father. Wisely never clarified is how much she knew beforehand and planned for what is to come, and how much is serendipitous, but the new employee soon volunteers to care for the boss’ son in November when secretary Jacqueline Onfray (Martine Chevallier) huffs that her daughter is unavailable.

Having aged more than the intervening years, neurasthenic since a hit-and-run accident, Mme. Ariane Fouchècourt (Catherine Frot) is the admissions judge whose careless act cost Mèlanie’s concentration and career. Hoping to resurrect her own career in a trio with cellist Laurent and his violinist wife, Ariane’s friend Virginie (Clotilde Mollet), the former concert performer is preparing for an essential Radio France recital and possible recording-touring offers. The defection of page turner Ingrid has distracted her, but the new household addition’s cooking, deferential demeanor, rapport with son Tristan (Antoine Martyciow, maybe Mèlanie’s age at the disastrous audition) -- with whom she sets up a potentially harmful “our secret” -- and revealed musical knowledge, prompt Ariane to take her on for the essential but unspotlighted position of keeping concert scores correct and viewable.

Decorously, almost severely dressed for one so young among wealthy conservatively dressed middle-agers, Mèlanie wears a slight, and ambiguous, smile. Unlike Wilde’s “please do not shoot the piano player” and Truffaut’s more famous title reversal, she has more devious designs, as the withdrawn and physically pinched older woman is captivated and led into unsuspected waters beyond her depth. In another uncertainty, and the pièce de résistance, one wonders if the final autographed photo is a completion of the circle where it began or was suggested by a second, intermediate such request. One scarcely troubles to question how the single-minded revenger could have suspected how perfectly the inscription would fit in, or whether this is merely another stroke of luck to be played on.

Smile, and smile, and be a villainess -- cool and outwardly emotionless. Her all-encompassing acts would be monstrous in another, but, while disquieted, one cannot help applauding the plot and its unromantized plotter, for however inadvertently, the blighting of youthful hopes is surely a serious business.

(Released by Tartan Films; not rated by MPAA.)