Rare film #1: Mortelle randonnée (Deadly Circuit, France 1983)

There is a useful website on which a kind soul has collected free streams of ‘rare movies’ (search for ‘rare films’). I watched a good quality HD print of this title which I don’t think I knew about before, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to have had a UK release (though Wikipedia claims one it isn’t on the BBFC database). In the US it was cut by around 20 minutes and released as Deadly Circuit. The print I watched was the full 120 minutes with English subs. I was attracted to a Claude Miller movie, having enjoyed several of his films previously (see This Sweet Sickness (1977), Un Secret (2007) and his final film Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012)). In this case Miller is adapting an American crime novel. I’m not sure whether Miller’s approach and that of his writers Michel Audiard and his son Jacques has shifted the tone of the original novel by Marc Behm. But since Behm was a kind of reverse American version of Jean-Pierre Melville (i.e. an American who discovered he loved French culture and eventually moved there), perhaps the novel (Eye of the Beholder) has a similar tone.

If I made a stab at attempting to classify this film I would say it is a form of crime/black comedy mixed with an unusual romance. It is very dark and violent at times but one reviewer described it as a French form of the screwball comedy. Other attempts have used terms like ‘absurdist’. IMDb just lists ‘Crime, Mystery’ which is not at all helpful. This confusion possibly explains why it wasn’t bought for the UK and why the American distributor cut it severely. Distributors tend to feel that comedy doesn’t cross language and culture borders. In this case I think they are wrong. I did at first think I was going to be watching a more sophisticated Inspector Clouseau film but that idea quickly melted away. I should also point out early on that the film looks fabulous with cinematography by Gilbert Duhalde and Pierre Lhomme. The locations are varied and always interesting – from Baden-Baden to Biarritz and Rome to industrial Belgium. The music is by Carla Bley (and Schubert) and the cast is fabulous.

Michel Serrault (who appeared in over 150 films, but is best known outside France for La Cage aux folles (1978), plays a private detective, Beauvoir, whose nickname is ‘the Eye’. He is summoned by his employer Mme Schmidt-Boulanger (Geneviève Page) to track down the young woman who has seduced/’turned the head’ of the son of a staid bourgeois couple in Brussels. The Eye is rather bored by the prospect of this job and he gazes out of the window to watch a character in workman’s clothes attacking Mme Schmidt-Boulanger’s car with a sledgehammer. It soon appears that the Eye is a very good detective and adept at following a suspect and getting himself out of trouble. But he also has a second obsession – he misses his daughter Marie and all he has is a school photo of her from 1961 when she was eight that he carries with him. He’s not even sure which young girl she is in the photo. The woman he is commissioned to find is Catherine/Lucie (Isabelle Adjani) and she proves to be a serial killer of rich men, who she first seduces and steals from and then dispatches with bloody violence but also great professionalism (there is also a female victim). She, we will discover later, has a form of father complex – he has also ‘gone missing’.  The ‘Eye’ finds her and follows her but he doesn’t manage to prevent any of the murders. Why not? Does he secretly want to ‘save’ her? Does he fantasise that she is the daughter he has lost?

Claude Miller trained at IDHEC and was first an assistant to François Truffaut, Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard. Mortelle Randonnée has something of the flavour of Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), which Truffaut adapted from a David Goodis novel, as well as other Truffaut films. It also has a flavour of the numerous Claude Chabrol crime melodramas, so I had high expectations. Michel Serrault creates a memorable character. He even survives what some critics would see as a no-no in a script, the lead character talks to himself, partly offering exposition but also demonstrating his feelings about his lost daughter through a voiceover that reappears at various times during the film. The actor is relatively short and dumpy  but with a dapper dress sense and a capacity to handle any of the crazy predicaments he finds himself in. I should also point out re ‘the dialogues’ that if you under understand French you will enjoy the Audiards’ work. The subtitles don’t do full justice to it according to reviewers with a much better ear and sense of spoken French than myself. Isabelle Adjani is breathtakingly beautiful in the many guises her deceptions push her into. I’ve seen her in many other films but never appreciated her performance as much as in this film. I was intrigued to read that in her career she achieved more César Awards than any of her female contemporaries. As Catherine travels across Europe by plane, train and car she and the Eye encounter a range of victims, blackmailers and detectives  – it might be worth adding the road movie to the genre mix. The characters are played by some star names in small parts including Sami Frey, Guy Marchand, Stéphane Audran and Jean-Claude Brialy among others. The last location is perhaps the most intriguing, an industrial town on the banks of the Meuse close to the French-Belgian border. Catherine is in a traditional downmarket hotel by the river. The isolated hotel reminded me of one of the classics of ‘poetic realism’, Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève (1939) and the night-time scenes with Catherine working as a waitress in late night restaurant-diner, ‘Le Miami’, seem to nod to American film noir.  But perhaps this is a truly French noir? A comedy-polar? A couple of years later Isabelle Adjani was in another polar – Luc Besson’s Subway (France 1985)

This is a ‘Marmite’ film. Some will love it, others will dismiss it as ‘silly’. I was hesitant at first but then enjoyed it immensely. You can find it in several versions just by searching for the French title. (There is an American remake or adaptation of the same novel titled Eye of the Beholder (US 1999), but it sounds rather different). I couldn’t find a trailer with English subs, but here is the French trailer: