Fierce mother played by Emmanuelle Devos fuels Moka

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      Starring Emmanuelle Devos. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

      That’s the eventual response of Diane Roy (French star Emmanuelle Devos), a resident of Lausanne, Switzerland, whose cycle-riding teenage son was recently killed by a hit-and-run driver on the road between that town and Évian, on the French side of Lake Geneva.

      Both French and Swiss police seem to have lost interest in finding the culprits, so Diane has hired her own detective to look into it. After she splits from a lakeside sanatorium, armed with info about a few mocha-coloured Mercedes in the area (hence the title), she decides to track down the owners herself. Luckily for her, the most likely vehicle is for sale and—in a development you might find in a Patricia Highsmith novel—she begins to insinuate herself into the lives of the couple who drive that Merc. (This is actually based on a book by Tatiana de Rosnay, whose earlier Sarah’s Key was made into a so-so historical thriller with Kristin Scott Thomas.)

      Diane knows that a blond woman was behind the wheel on the fatal day. So target number one is Marlène, the well-put-together, 60-something owner of a beauty shop in Évian. (She’s played by Nathalie Baye, best known for international hits in the 1970s and ’80s.) Handling the car-vending duties is Marlène’s much younger partner, a handsome, devil-eyed fellow (David Clavel) who also works at the spa of the hotel where Diane is staying. There’s definitely something in the waters. She probes both for information, somehow managing to keep them separate until, well, she doesn’t.

      Along the way, our troubled mother also spends time with Marlène’s sullen daughter (Diane Rouxel), who brings out her maternal instincts, and a youngish local hustler (The Love Punch’s Olivier Chantreau), who doesn’t. He’s the mustachioed fellow who gets her that black-market gat, and this allows Swiss director Frédéric Mermoud (who directed Devos in his previous feature, Accomplices) to keep pushing the 90-minute movie into Hitchcock-Chabrol genre directions while never letting go of the more psychological character study at its centre. The smoothly structured, beautifully acted Moka builds slowly toward a tug of war between thriller conventions and deeper emotions. And the audience wins.

      Watch the trailer for Moka.

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