Un été d’enfer (1984) - film review

After an accident, Philippe Darlan is forced to give up his career as a professional motorcyclist and ends up working for his uncle’s private detective agency.  Elisabeth Leroy hires him to find her sister Valérie who went missing three months ago.  Darlan’s investigations lead him to a drug ring which is being protected by a crooked police inspector.

In many ways, Un été d’enfer typifies the kind of film noir thriller that was made in France in the mid 1980s.  To distract us from the familiar plot and tired stereotypical characters (which might suggest an obvious reversion to film noir of the 1940s) there is an excess of visual style and gratuitous violence.  In retrospect, this would seem to be as sensible as trying to hide an elephant by painting bright orange stripes on its back.  Needless to say this formula rarely worked and more often than not the result was a shambolic piece of nonsense.  With its lousy acting, lousy script and lousy direction, Un été d’enfer is clearly in this latter category.

The main reason why the film fails is that Thierry Lhermitte is hopelessly miscast as the film’s principal good guy.  At the time, the actor was well established as a comic performer but, as was apparent in Serge Leroy’s L’Indic (1983), he clearly had the talent and the motivation for serious dramatic roles.  Unfortunately, in Un été d’enfer, Lhermitte is both totally unconvincing and totally unsympathetic – although this can in part be attributed to the script, which makes little effort to create a credible character for him to portray.   Lhermitte’s co-stars, Véronique Jannot and Daniel Duval are equally ill-served by the script, although Duval at least manages to make his character believable.

Although the film does have a few rare touches of brilliance (the opening sequence and then, near the end of the film, the pin-ball sequence), these are obliterated by some tacky indulgences, including some trashy pieces of erotica which would look bad even in one of the Emmanuelle films.  All in all, Un été d’enfer is a film that is so bad that you wouldn’t really want to watch it without a video remote control near at hand, offering the comforting security of the “fast forward” or "stop and eject" options.

© James Travers 2004

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