|
Credits
|
|
|
Summary
A beautiful 19 year old girl, Eliane, moves into a Provençal village with her invalid
father and German mother. She draws the attention of all the men in the village,
but it is the timid fire-fighter 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...
Review
What could easily have been a run-of-the-mill psychological thriller actually turns out
to be a thoroughly compelling and beautifully filmed piece of cinema, a strong contender
for Jean Becker’s best film to date. The plot is classic pulp fiction material but
Becker’s treatment of it is, whilst not hugely original, supremely confident, with echoes
of Hitchcock and Clouzot running throughout the suspense-laden narrative.
What makes this film particularly memorable is Isabelle Adjani’s remarkable performance, unquestionably one of her best, and one which certainly merited her a best actress César. Although the film switches its perspective between the various lead characters in the film, it is Eliane, the mysterious and vindictive young woman who is the centre of our attention. Adjani portrays the character as a dangerously seductive beauty and a truly disturbing individual, but with a vulnerability that also makes her sympathetic and believable. Adjani’s intense, emotional performance makes a perfect contrast with that of Alain Souchon, whose portrayal of Eliane’s hapless victim Pin-Pon is far more restrained yet equally moody and poignant. The film gives Souchon, who is better known as a popular singer, plenty of mileage to show his talent as an actor, perhaps more so than any other film he has starred in before or since. There are also strong performances from the supporting cast, most notably from Jenny Clève, Maria Machado and Michel Galabru. Music plays an important part in nearly all of Jean Becker’s films and, in L’Été meurtrier it is an integral part of the film. The film opens with the bizarre sight of man dragging a barrel organ across open countryside - the first of a number of haunting flashbacks from modern day France to the 1950s. Although it takes a while to get there, the barrel organ becomes the central part of the narrative. It is the jaunty tune it produces whilst accompanying a brutal act of rape which provides the film’s most shocking experience (similar to the attempted child murder scene at the start of Becker’s subsequent film Elisa). Georges Delerue’s score is no less evocative, adding to the tension and emphasising that beneath the surface their lurks an all-consuming deadly menace. The France Provençal of this film is a nightmarish mix of ennui, personal vendettas and suppressed sexual tensions - a stark contrast with the idyllic paradise of Jean Becker’s 1999 film Les Enfants du marais. The frequent use of flashbacks and also voice-over to present the narrative from various different perspectives are familiar Becker devices but they work very well in this film. In fact Becker’s approach work so well that you wonder why he hasn’t made other films in this genre. Both intellectually and artistically, L’Été meurtrier is an engrossing and immensely satisfying film. © James Travers 2002 Write a review for this film... |
|
