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.
© James Travers 2002
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Next Jean Becker film:
Élisa (1995)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.