Deadly Circuit

Looking at my April viewings,the most unexpected quality viewing I've had is François Truffaut's 1975 Costume Drama The Story of Adele H,largely due to the performance from Isabelle Adjani. Since seeing him charge the Neo-Noir atmosphere up with 1981's Garde à vue,I've been keeping a look out for more creations by Claude Miller. Checking Adjani's credits,I was thrilled to find that she had worked with Miller on a Neo-Noir that has recently turned up uncut with Subs, (the cut DVD came out after US remake Eye of the Beholder)which led to me breaking the circuit. View on the film: Following up Garde à vue by cameraman Gilbert Duhalde becoming the cinematographer here, directing auteur Claude Miller beautifully expands on the recurring motifs of Garde with lush outdoor watercolours, and a haunting Jazz score from Carla Bley. Making the 2 hour run-time move at an incredible speed, Miller gives "The Eye" tracking Marie a pristine Neo-Noir clarity of tracking shots following The Eye's attempts to blend in with the crowd. Bending the initial investigation to the Eye's growing obsession,Miller twists it into an ultra-stylised dream-logic world,where Marie's killings have the metallic shine of Giallo, a telekinetic-like connection made with smoothly-held tracking shots,and an explosive shattering of the connection between The Eye and Marie. Spreading limited details of Marie's life across the screen in photos, Michel & Jacques Audiard's adaptation of Marc Behm's book brims with a Neo-Noir attention to detail,where The Eye excitingly takes the smallest clue to make the fullest portrait of Marie. Turning the mystery down to a simmering threat, the writers masterfully piece together The Eye's years following of Marie into a study of obsession, where the anticipation of speaking to her gets The Eye to start imagining/performing what he dreams their first encounter will be. Lighting the eyes of The Eye from every sighting, Isabelle Adjani gives a magnificent performance as Marie, whose mysterious murmurs on her life pulls everyone from Stéphane Audran's " The grey lady" to Sami Frey's Ralph Forbes towards this Femme Fatale's blast of silence. Reuniting with Miller after Garde,Michel Serrault gives a thrilling performance as Neo-Noir loner The Eye,with Serrault and Adjani impressively creating chemistry just from glances at each other. Desiring to learn all about Marie,Serrault strips The Eye's life to a raw obsession,which cracks as the deadly circuit breaks.

There's a private detective who keeps an old b/w photo with him. It shows a class of little girls and one of them is his daughter but he doesn't know which one so they're all his daughter. There's a mysterious girl, beautiful and a little sad, she goes around changing names and wigs and killing rich men (but not for their money, the money only the means by which she can sustain herself until she can kill again) and she tells outrageous made-up stories about a father she probably never met. The movie sets itself up as something potentially quirky, a noir patchwork where the dialogue is witty, a corpse is dumped in a lake, and the private dick tails the mysterious woman from murder to murder. It's around that point when the movie must decide the course, when the crime mystery begins to dissolve into something irrelevant because the private dick is not trying to catch her any more, in fact he starts erasing her traces and lying to his boss, and he calls her "Marie", the name of his long lost daughter, so that we're not asking whys anymore but rather staring obsession straight in the eye. This newfound surrogate daughter becomes a compulsion but it only starts there. It gets confusing, almost surreal like characters can foresee things, but it's an interesting confusion for me because the latenight atmosphere is right and something intuitive is suggested between the two protagonists. It's like we're in the cavelike gloom of a hotel staircase and the plot is used like an oil lamp that serves to increase that gloom and mystery for us and we can't tell at once what is going on on the top floor until we're halfway up there. At one point there's a TV showing FW Murnau's The Last Laugh and the girl begins fashioning another madeup tale about her father, tailored this time after Emil Janning's hotel porter character in Murnau's movie, the tale is outrageous and weepy like bad melodrama but it's the telling that makes it poignant, like the magnitude of the lie suggests the depth of what is broken. Michel Serrault's private detective is one of the most fascinating movie characters of the 80's, he's methodical in his work but also a little detached from everything around him like Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlow in The Long Goodbye, and the only thing that keeps him going is the pursuit of obsession. Right down to the amazingly sad ending, Mortelle Randonnee is a forgotten gem, a little flawed around the edges and the details sometimes go out of focus like we're in a car and the view from the window is blurred but we stop at places and bizarre things happen there (often at gunpoint) and then we're on the move again, and it's that neon- lit blur of something sad and desperate that makes it fascinating.

There is, alas, only one Prevert and if only Audiard realized and accepted that he may have abandoned his attempts to eclipse Prevert as a master of word-play and been content to try and equal him though even that was never going to happen. Claude Miller is definitely quirky and probably wouldn't know how to go about shooting an 'ordinary' film and as a result he either misses by a mile or hits one out of the park. This is one of his most surreal efforts but also one of his best but it helps if you are prepared to accept wackiness as Art form. A private investigator, Serrault, barely going through the motions of living since he allowed a personal tragedy - his wife walked out on him taking the daughter he never really knew and the daughter subsequently died aged seven - to color everything that came after, is assigned a fairly routine case to discredit what is assumed to be the gold-digging fiancé of a wealthy young man; instead he finds she is a serial killer and allows himself to fantasise that she is his lost daughter miraculously restored to life and is happy to watch passively as she moves from country to country leaving a string of dead man - plus one lesbian lover - in her wake; he is also not above covering her tracks. In terms of realism it makes Lord Of The Rings look like a documentary but it is also compelling. If you like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing you'll like.

Mortelle randonée is a brilliant and somewhat noir-ish thriller with a subtle twist of comedy. Isabelle Adjani's beauty has never been more glowing than here as the central femme fatale, and Michel Serrault manages to be both touching and very funny as the lonesome private eye, in search of a long lost daughter. As an added bonus Carla Bley's sexy and jazzy score is simply stunning and makes this overlooked gem a definite must-see. Director Claude Miller has had a long impressive career – he started out working for Truffaut – but only rarely has his work been this relaxed, cool and yet still magnificently melodramatic. The inferior "Eye of the Beholder" (1999) was based on the same novel (and Ewan McGregor was way to young for the part). The Wellspring DVD contains only heavily edited American release and this version simply doesn't work. Wait for someone to release this wonderful film uncut.(actually TF1 already have - with French subtitles only!)

This is not what i expected. I thought this was gonna be a crime/thriller movie or something like that. Turns out it is a dark comedy. A deconstruction of crime/noir films, a parody. I liked it a lot. There were a few hilarious scenes but it's not a laughing out loud movie, humor is more dry and subtle. It never became exciting but it was enjoyable all the way. Probably it should have been 10-ish minutes shorter, truth is, it kinda lost steam during the last 40 minutes. But still, it was easy to watch. Serrault was amusing, Adjani was a delight (Ok, a bit of a deadly delight). Don't look for plausibility though, characters were cartoonish and overall it is not a realistic movie. Just go with it and you will probably like it. Ending was good. There is a minor twist i didn't see it coming which made it more meaningful. Still this is not a great movie, more of an oddity i'd say. I've watched the 120 minutes version.

You can see what this movie is trying to say....in fact, you can see it all too well, as it keeps beating you over the head with its two central ideas: Michel Serrault has lost his daughter and sees Isabelle Adjani as a potential replacement, to the degree that he is willing to overlook her murderous tendencies, while Adjani has developed these murderous tendencies because she has also lost her father at a young age. This story could have been told in a 30-minute short; in 115 (or 95, depending on which version you watch) minutes it is plodding and repetitive (she kills, he follows her, she kills, he follows her, she kills....), not to mention unbelievable. Serrault gives a good performance, however he spends about 80% of the movie mumbling to himself and has little interaction with other people, which makes his character tedious not before long. To fair, there ARE a couple of memorable scenes: Adjani's cold-blooded razor slashing of another woman is one, the car stunt at the end is another. ** out of 4.

The French love for American crime novels has been written about many times. Jim Thompson's works have been adapted by many of the leading directors. Truffaut's early career was based largely on this genre; he made Shoot the Pianist from David Goodis's novel, and many of Chabrol's films are taken from American pulp. Claude Miller made his second film Dites-lui que je l'aime from Patricia Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness. In Mortelle Randonnee, Miller is working with Marc Behm's novel The Eye of the Beholder, which I haven't read. I suppose Miller chose to throw out most of the plot elements of Behm's book; that's the usual practice in France. The theme of obsessional love of a man for the girl he believes to be his daughter is triumphantly brought to life by a great cast, aided by Carla Bley's richly melancholic music (post-modern brass band?), Pierre Lhomme's lovely camera-work (those rain-slicked night shots, the sad neon lights on hotel fronts), the expert choice of sets (Helmut Newton would have loved that German health spa where Catherine meets the lesbian Cora). Finally, the wonderful cast: Michel Serrault so wistful as the private investigator preparing an endless series of cover-ups of Adjani's killings, he's as good here as he was in Garde à vue; Isabelle Adjani living on her jangled nerves as she criss-crosses Europe in search of new prey; Geneviève Page (who I remember from Belle de jour--the brothel keeper) as the crisp director of the detective agency Serrault works for; the startling transformation of the gorgeous Stéphane Audran into a homely housewife--what a makeup job--who is also tracking Adjani. The last act is darker and more anguished than the preceding ones, the viewer will have to resist the urge to ask what happened to the comic bits.

Marc Behm had written a screenplay for producer Philip Yordan which was unused but provided the basis for his novel 'Eye of the Beholder'. It is only fitting that the setting of this adaptation by Michel and Jacques Audiard should be changed from North America to France as Behm was an avowed Francophile. The phrase 'style over substance' could easily apply to the early scenes of Claude Miller's film and although it never ceases to be stylish it gradually draws one in and becomes utterly compelling. The main thrust of the plot is the distant relationship between Catherine, a bi-sexual serial murderess and private detective Beauvoir who develops a paternal obsession to protect her, even to the point of hiding the bodies of her victims. That two such disturbed and dysfuntional characters are able to arouse our sympathy is down to Claude Miller's inspired casting of Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani. Monsieur Serrault proved himself adept at both comedy and tragedy and had previously impressed in this director's 'Garde a vue'. An immensely talented artiste, he again displays an ability to portray someone walking an emotional tightrope. Since being cast by Francois Truffaut as Adele Hugo, Mlle Adjani has gone from strength to strength and excels in unbalanced characters struggling with their inner demons. She possesses an indefinable air of mystery and what one critic referred to as her 'signature stare' serves her well in this. Full marks must go to the make up artiste who has rendered gorgeous Stéphane Audran unrecognisable, well, almost, as the 'Grey lady' and there is a fascinating performance as a blind millionaire by Sami Frey. The scene of the traffic accident involving Frey and Serrault must have had an especially painful resonance for Serrault as he had lost his teenage daughter in a car crash six years earlier. Indeed that personal tragedy must surely have informed his performance as an older man desperately seeking a young woman as a substitute for the daughter he never knew. The film did not do well commercially but has since acquired cult status in its native country whilst Stephan Elliott's pointless remake has sunk without trace. Deservedly so.

One of the best movies ever. Very dark, very deadpan, perfect acting. Great script, too. The La Paloma version in the blind man's villa is by Hans Albers.

I watched EYE OF THE BEHOLDER a couple of weeks ago. It was the remake of this film, itself adapted from Marc Behm's novel. Both were. Each of these two movies is pretty good, but very different in the way of filming and also story telling. I would say this one is closer to the book, at least about the pear eater female character played by Isabelle Adjani. As far as I remember, it is not spoken about in the 1999 film. I also appreciate the Geneviève Page's performance as the Michel Serrault's boss, she reminds me Paul Meurisse in her way of talking, at least in her first sequence. Pretty amusing. This is the best French crime mystery movie from the eighties. a sad and poor decade for the French movie industry.