Eaux profondes (1981)

Eaux profondes is a French thriller film first released in 1981, directed by Michel Deville.  The film stars Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Sandrine Kljajic, Éric Frey and Christian Benedetti.  It has also been released under the title: Deep Water.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Vic Allen appears to accept his young wife Melanie’s flirtations with men of her own age with a generous insouciance.  He amuses himself by scaring off her potential lovers by claiming that he killed one of their predecessors.   This only increases his wife’s antagonism towards him, but Vic loves her too much to let her go.  When Melanie’s next suitor is found dead in a swimming pool, she is convinced that her husband killed him, but she has no proof.  Their psychological battle of wills has only just begun...

Although somewhat marred by its jarring excesses (particularly the overuse of music to create and emphasise mood), Eaux profondes is a respectable adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel, painting a disturbing portrait of marital conflict in a seemingly respectable bourgeois setting.  The director, Michel Deville, is clearly influenced by the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock and his French counterpart Claude Chabrol, particularly in the use of camera movements and set lighting to create tension and suspense.

Jean-Louis Trintignant stars in what must undoubtedly rate as one of his most chilling performances, playing a man who flies into a rage when his pet snails are endangered but who has no compunction whatsoever about killing other men to keep his wife.  This first rate performance is closely matched by that of his co-star, Isabelle Huppert, who portrays exactly the right blend of feminine vulnerability and cold masculine resolve.

Although the film tends to drift in its second half, and its ending is far from perfect, Eaux profondes is a curiously compelling work which is not afraid to shock its audience.  It has the characteristic tongue-in-cheek quirkiness of Michel Deville’s other films and it is in many ways one of his most accessible and sinister works.


© James Travers 2002

The perversity of Vic and Melanie makes me think of Mme de Merteuil and Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons...
© H. Mulder 2008 (Wijhe, Netherlands)


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