A Few Days in September

Juliette Binoche, John Turturro and Nick Nolte star in this edge-of-your-seat conspiracy thriller. Ten days before 9/11, Elliott (Nolte), a CIA agent who is holding top secret information on the immediate future of the world, disappear appears. Irène (Binoche), a French agent, along with Elliott’s abandoned son and daughter, follow the trail from Paris to Venice in a race against time to uncover the truth.

In this offbeat international thriller, a secret agent tries to unite two step-siblings with their fugitive father. The trouble begins on September 5th, 2001 when former CIA operative Elliot (Nick Nolte in a brief, but effective cameo) flees Paris without telling his daughter, Orlando (Perfume’s Sara Forestier), or his stepson, David (Tom Riley), freshly arrived from the States. (After his first wife died, Elliot left France for the US, where he remarried.) Once his former associate, Irène (a bespectacled Juliette Binoche), realizes that Elliot's ex-partner, William (John Turturro, alternating between French and English), has them in his sites, she collects the kids--who have only just met--and they set off to find Elliot. It's not that William wants to harm the duo, but rather to extract information about their father in order to execute him. As they haven't seen Elliot in years, Irène and her charges have no idea what he might have done. All they know is that he's waiting for them in Venice. The final showdown takes place on September 10th--and no, that date is not coincidental. First-time French-Argentinean director Santiago Amigorena doles information out slowly to draw out the suspense, but A Few Days in September is more quirky than pulse-pounding. Irène's only companion, for instance, is a turtle, while William recites poetry after each kill. If suspense is in short supply, cliché is also kept to a minimum, and the usually intense Binoche, as a wise-cracking, chain-smoking spook, finally gets to have some fun. --Kathleen C. Fennessy