L'Été meurtrier (1983)
Directed by Jean Becker

Film Review

After an absence of 17 years, director Jean Becker made a spectacular return to cinema with this distinctive erotic thriller, adapted from a novel by Sébastien Japrisot which was itself inspired by a real-life incident.  Jean Becker had enjoyed considerable success in the 1960s, with his comedies Échappement libre (1964) and Tendre voyou (1966), but he subsequently gave up filmmaking to pursue a career in advertising.  L'Été meurtrier was the most successful French film of 1983 (it attracted an audience of 5.1 million in France) and effectively rebooted Becker's filmmaking career.  The director followed this up with two more box office hits, Élisa (1995) and Les Enfants du marais (1999).

L'Été meurtrier is the most inspired and compelling of Jean Becker's films, a dark study in the futility of revenge.  Vaguely reminiscent of some of the best films by Claude Chabrol, the film has a sustained aura of menace, building to a predictably horrific denouement which is all the more effective for being not quite the denouement we anticipate.  In one of the defining roles of her career, Isabelle Adjani turns in a performance that is as chilling to watch as it is mesmeric, as authentic a portrayal of mental derangement as cinema has ever given us.  When we first meet Adjani's character, we are struck by her wild, liberated temperament - she is the archetypal femme fatale, mysterious and deadly, the essence of a male fantasy.  But it isn't until we approach the end of the film that we realise what a driven and dangerously unhinged character she is, and with good reason.  She is both the reflection of a society that has gone horribly bad and an avenging angel who has come to purge that society.

Here, Adjani is extraordinarily well-partnered with Alain Souchon, a popular musician of the time who had made his screen debut a few years previously in Claude Berri's Je vous aime (1980).  Souchon's apparent air of innocence makes him the perfect foil for Adjani's opaque and manipulative Eliane, something that renders the ending particularly poignant and shocking.  There are some equally strong contributions from the supporting cast, most notably from Jenny Clève, Maria Machado, François Cluzet and Michel Galabru, and also Suzanne Flon, who would feature in several of Becker's subsequent films.

Another excellent match is Georges Delerue's score and Étienne Becker's cinematography, which work well together to suggest the dark undercurrents lying just beneath the surface.  The sunny provençal setting has a much more sinister character than that seen in Becker's later film, Les Enfants du marais, but is used just as effectively.  Becker skilfully employs the old film noir devices of the flashback and inner monologue to draw us into his protagonists' inner worlds and expose their conflicting perspectives for dramatic effect.  A critical and commercial success, L'Été meurtrier was nominated for nine Césars  in 1984, winning four awards, in the categories of Best Actress (Adjani), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Supporting Actress (Flon).  It is an achievement worthy of Becker's illustrious father, the great cineaste Jacques Becker.

Film Synopsis

A beautiful 19 year old girl, Eliane, moves into a provençal village with her invalid father and German mother.  She immediately draws the attention of all the men in the village, but it is the timid garage owner Florimond she chooses to go out with.   When, one day, she announces she is pregnant, Florimond hastily arranges a marriage, without realising that he is being duped.  Eliane is merely using him so that she can track down and kill the three men who brutally raped her mother twenty years ago...