La Lune dans le caniveau (1983)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Film Review

Jean-Jacques Beineix may not have won over the critics but his first feature, Diva (1981), was a notable box office success, attracting an audience of over two million in France alone.  The critics had even more to complain about with his second film, La Lune dans le caniveau, a liberal adaptation of David Goodis's 1983 novel The Moon in the Gutter which positively revels in its lurid artistry and rejection of conventional film narrative.  For the film's detractors, this second Beineix offering exemplified all that was wrong with the so-called cinéma du look that hit French cinema in the early 1980s, films that apparently threw out every vestige of narrative substance in the pursuit of visual artistry for its own sake.

Along with Luc Besson and Leos Carax, Beineix sought to bring a vigorous modernity to cinema, through a greater emphasis on design and visual poetry, but all three suffered from a mostly negative critical appraisal that greatly hindered their respective careers.  Three decades on, the work of these three brazen innovators has come to be far more favourably assessed - indeed many now consider their films to be some of the most inspired and meaningful of the 1980s, a decade in which verve and originality were in very short supply.

La Lune dans le caniveau is certainly a far less palatable proposition than Diva.  A slick, well-paced modern thriller, Diva combines stunning visuals with a strong plot and solid, believable characters.  By contrast, Beineix's second feature is a dream-like haze of a film that moves along at a snail's pace and never seems to coalesce into anything concrete.  It's an alluring and unusal film, its uninhibited use of colour, stage-like sets and fluid camerawork giving it an artificiality that is both striking and eerie.  There's a claustrophobic feel to the film, which gradually intensifies as it progresses, so that you end up feeling as trapped as the central protagonist.  There are no abrupt transitions.  Scenes flow gently into one another as in a dream; fantasy and reality are brought together so seamlessly that we can scarcely tell one from the other.  The film is gloriously self-conscious and yet it has a strangeness and poetry that no other French film of the 1980s had.  It is a singularly weird and beguiling piece of film art.

The film's most obvious weak point is a lack of depth on the characterisation front, but Beineix gets away with this (at least to a degree) by employing two incredibly charismatic actors for the two lead roles - Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski.  Their characters, Gérard and Loretta, are blatant film noir archetypes - he is the tragic loner stuck in his own personal Hell, she is the seductive femme fatale who offers either escape or damnation.  Depardieu and Kinski hardly need to act - the camera does all the work, establishing their characters as lost souls continually meeting and parting, yet never really making contact, in a contorted noir fantasy.

Gérard is like some ghoul from a Gothic fantasy stalking the lower depths of Marseille on a never-ending quest for revenge; Loretta is the mystical object of desire that has been man's temptress since the dawn of time, as elusive and ominous as the private goal that Gérard has set himself.  Revenge and desire make up the terrible concoction that Gérard imbibes as he is driven blindly onwards, alienating himself from those closest to him and becoming increasing divorced from reality as his twin obsessions grow and fuse into an all-consuming need for release.  The film ends with no clear resolution, just a harrowing sense that Gérard's nightmare will never end.  'Try Another World' are the words that scream mockingly at him from a billboard poster.  He ignores them and remains where he is, trapped forever in a dark sealed room from which there is no escape.

Beineix claims that his original cut of the film ran to four hours, but he had to reduce this to just over two hours to satisfy the distributors.  When he wanted to make a director's cut of the film - as he had done, successfully, with his next feature, 37°2 le matin - he learned that Gaumont had destroyed all the unused footage from the original film.  We will never know what La Lune dans le caniveau was intended to look like, but if you consider how greatly Beineix's next film was improved by its re-edit, it might well have been a masterpiece.

Film Synopsis

In present day Marseille, a young dockworker named Gérard Delmas is haunted by the brutal death of his sister, who committed suicide with a razor after being raped in the street.  Since that terrible night he has moped about the city's seedier precincts, looking for clues that will lead him to identify the man who led his sister to take her life and inflict on him his idea of justice.  One evening, a beautiful woman in a red sports car suddenly glides into his life.  Gérard already has a girlfriend, Bella, who is devotedly attached to him, but this other woman, Loretta, is a far more fascinating proposition.  Rich, elegant and seductive, she looks like a princess and offers him the possibility of a way out of his personal nightmare.  But he chooses to stay and pursue his deadly obsession right to the bitter end...