L’Alliance (1971) - film review

With the help of a marriage agency, a young veterinary surgeon, Hugues, manages to find his ideal wife, Jeanne, who fulfils his main requirement: she is the owner of a large apartment in Paris.  Although they are happy together at first, Hugues begins to find his wife’s placid behaviour unsettling, suspecting she may be seeing another man.  Jeanne is equally perplexed by her husband’s strange behaviour, as he buries himself in his research into his animals’ powers of perception.  When a deadly serpent goes missing, Hugues becomes convinced that his wife is trying to kill him…

Although it is little known today, L’Alliance is a film which is well worth seeing, a bizarre mix of black comedy and psychological thriller, which still appears surprisingly fresh and modern.  Its strident, eerie music and the creepy cinematography, coupled with some even creepier acting performances from Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Carrière, makes this a compelling drama in paranoia and obsession.

Christian de Chalonge somehow manages to sustain a Hitchcockian level of suspense right up until the last shot, constantly teasing the viewer but revealing the absolute minimum.  This is one of those films where the spectator has plenty of freedom to make his own interpretation and draw his own conclusions, making it an ambiguous yet extremely intelligent work of cinema.

Both the plot (taken from Carrière’s own novel) and film’s construction are breath-takingly original, allowing the film to develop a unique atmosphere which is both unsettling (certainly for anyone expecting a conventional film) and totally engrossing.  The film combines the banal with the frighteningly surreal to chilling effect.

© James Travers 2000

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