La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (2015)
Directed by Joann Sfar

Film Review

Graphic artist-turned filmmaker Joann Sfar goes into reto mode in a big way in his latest film, a luridly 70s-style interpretation of Sébastien Japrisot's novel La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil, which had previously been adapted by Anatole Litvak in 1970.  Buoyed up by the immense success of his first two films, Gainsbourg, vie héroïque (2010) and Le Chat du rabbin (2011), both of which won him Césars, Sfar indulges his passion for 1970s thrillers to the fullest extent in a film that many will doubtless judge as a supreme example of style over substance.  Those who like their thrillers to be inundated with split screens and innumerable references to past films may warm to Sfar's paranoiac odyssey, but those expecting a slick thriller with believable characters, a coherent narrative and nice tidy ending are in for a disappointment.

Sfar claims he was more influenced by René Clément's Le passager de la pluie (1970) than Litvak's swansong piece, and this might partly account for the casting of Scottish actress Freya Mavor (best known for her appearance in the British series Skins) in the lead role, as she looks more like Marlène Jobert than Samantha Eggar.  Mavor has a hard job carrying a film in which she is pretty well the solo player and which is frustratingly lacking in substance, although she copes surprisingly well despite a script that could have benefited from at least three more redrafts.

La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil is the first film Joann Sfar directed which he did not himself script, and his directorial excesses looks look suspiciously like an attempt to compensate for this.  Japrisot's subjective novel would be a challenge for any filmmaker and Sfar is at least successful in blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, so that for most of the film we are unable to tell whether the lead character is the victim of a carefully contrived plot or just plainly out of her mind.  In the end, it is the overly laid on second-hand stylisation that ruins the film and makes it seem no more than an indulgence trip for its director.

Film Synopsis

Dany Dorémus is an attractive redhead who works as a secretary for an advertising agency.  One morning, her boss asks her to drive him and his family to the airport and then take his car, a Ford Thunderbird, back to his house.  Acting on impulse, Dany decides instead to drive the car to the coast.  As she heads for the Riviera, she embarks on what will soon become a living nightmare.  In the boot of the car there is a corpse and a gun...