L'Inconnu de Strasbourg
1998 Drama / Thriller
Credits
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Summary
Madeleine is spending an evening with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband appears unexpectedly.
The latter produces a gun and forces Madeleine to join in a variant of Russian roulette,
which he loses. Having shot dead her husband, Madeleine implores her lover
to run away. During his flight, Jean-Paul gives a lift to a vagrant, who turns against
him, knocking him unconscious before crashing his car. Believing Jean-Paul to have
been killed in a car accident, Madeleine allows police inspector Audiard to draw the obvious
conclusion that it was he who killed her husband. The case is closed and Audiard,
a novelist in his spare time, is pleased to have found a plot for his next novel.
When he regains consciousness, Jean-Paul has lost his memory. He is helped by a
kind old man (who turns out to be an arsonist), before returning to his hometown of Strasbourg,
to keep a date with someone he has forgotten. Here, a passing woman recognises him
as her husband, Christian Vogel, who disappeared three years ago. Accepting this
identification as fact, Jean-Paul allows himself to be manipulated by the Vogel family
so that they can claim their vast inheritance. Later, Madeleine meets Jean-Paul
and is surprised when he fails to recognise her. Little by little, Jean-Paul recalls
his past life and starts to make sense of his bizarre present situation…
Review
L’Inconnu de Strasbourg is an unusual
psychological thriller from Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento. The film initially
gives the impression of being a very sloppy genre film, with a plot which relies far too
heavily on coincidence to be taken at all seriously. Then, as the film develops,
it becomes a much more unsettling and interesting work, precariously straddling the narrow
line between surrealist art and tired cliché, openly recognising its faults and
then repeating them, as if this were some kind of bizarre nightmare.
The hand of Raoul Ruiz as co-screenwriter is very apparent – his peculiar brand of dark comedic surrealist fantasy clearly impinging on the low grade B movie thriller plot, giving it an artistic kudos it doesn’t really deserve. Moody performances from Charles Berling and Ornella Mutti contribute to the film’s weird atmosphere, although the sheer absurdity of the plot (to say nothing of its extraordinary complexity) does ultimately prevent the film from having any real impact. © James Travers 2004 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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