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Mortelle Randonée
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| Year: |
1983
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Director: |
Claude Miller
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| Stars: |
Michel Serrault, Isabelle Adjani, Guy Marchand, Stéphane Audran, Macha Méril, Geneviève Page, Sami Frey, Dominique Frot, Patrick Bouchitey, Isabelle Ho, François Bernheim, Gilberte Lauvray, Jean-Claude Brialy
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Drama, Thriller |
| Rating: |
 10 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Beauvoir (Michel Serrault), an aging private detective, is trailing the beautiful Catherine Leiris (Isabelle Adjani), who is actually a prolific serial killer. She marries wealthy men only to rob and murder them on their wedding night. However, though Beauvoir never meets his quarry, he comes to believe they share an almost telepathic understanding of one another. It somehow occurs to Beauvoir that Catherine might in fact be the daughter he lost contact with long ago and spent a lifetime searching for. As Catherine continues killing, Beauvoir winds up covering her crimes.
Claude Miller’s fantastically well paced movie handles dark psychological themes with a rare lightness of touch. Mortelle Randonée was based on the novel Eye of the Beholder, written by American Marc Behm, whose best known credit is as the screenwriter of the Beatles movie Help! (1965). Behm developed a fascination with French culture after being stationed there as a G.I., making it somewhat fitting his work found a more appreciative audience in his adopted country than in the land of his birth. Alongside an early biopic of singer Edith Piaf, his screenwriting credits include the intriguingly offbeat Someone Behind the Door (1972) and the atypically strong Bert I. Gordon thriller The Mad Bomber (1974), while Eye of the Beholder spawned a disastrous Hollywood remake starring Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd.
Aside from the remake, Miller’s film shares certain thematic parallels with Black Widow (1987), which in spite of pairing Theresa Russell as the calculating murderess with Debra Winger as the obsessed F.B.I. agent, was an altogether more conventional affair. Black Widow in turn went on to spawn legions of erotic thrillers throughout the Nineties whose overwrought approach only underlines the uniqueness of Miller’s movie. Part thriller, part psychodrama, part pitch black comedy. Its dry comic tone signalled in an early scene where Beauvoir spies a thief breaking into the car owned by his bitchy boss (Geneviève Page) and does nothing.
Beauvoir’s voyeuristic obsession is driven by paternal love rather than erotic lust. The plot hinges on the poignant notion that two lost and lonely souls share a spiritual connection on some subliminal level. It neatly subverts that feeling many of us have had at some time or another, that lost loved one were watching over us like a guardian angel. The flipside to this idea is that Beauvoir may be as crazy as Catherine. When Catherine razors a lesbian admirer called Cora (Isabelle Ho) to death in a swimming pool and steals her identity, Beauvoir happily covers her crime, but when she has a chance at happiness with blind millionaire Ralph Forbes (Sami Frey), his intervention smacks of self-interest. Miller keeps things ambiguous. We never know whether this connection exists only in Beauvoir’s head. His meddling only drives Catherine to more desperate crimes, including bank robbery alongside her partner Betty (Dominique Frot). She finds herself being trailed by another duo: a scheming blackmailer (Guy Marchand) and his homely girlfriend (an unrecognisable Stéphane Audran), forcing Beauvoir to intervene once again in a warped attempt to set things right.
The novel features a first person narrator, which Miller translates cinematically by having the marvellously world-weary Serrault talk constantly to himself. Serrault paints an affecting portrait of a sad and lonely man full of regret for his lost child. In an equally mesmerising performance, the ravishing Isabelle Adjani plays a similarly tragicomic character, lost and lonely, a pitiable albeit dangerous serial killer. Sympathetic but deadly is a tricky combination to pull off, but caught at the height of her beauty and powers as an actress, Adjani undergoes an astonishing array of psychical and emotional transformations. She ably encapsulates Beauvoir’s description of Catherine: “She killed a man but she looks like a kid.”
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| Reviewer: |
Andrew Pragasam
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