Rezension von Red-Barracuda

A playboy is forced to leave the country after plunging his father's business into financial problems after using company funds to support his lifestyle with his high maintenance girlfriend. He joins the Foreign Legion as a means of forgetting his past. When in North Africa he meets a woman who is a look-a-like for his former fiancé and so begins a romantic obsession.

This French movie could quite easily be described as a proto-noir given its early release year, yet unmistakable film-noir aspects. The story has a gloomy feel and atmosphere and it focuses on a down-on-his-luck anti-hero and femme fatale. Alfred Hitchcock's later revered movie Vertigo (1958) shares (or borrowed) the pretty specific idea of a man obsessed with a woman who closely resembles a past love, to the point that he treats her not as a person but as an ideal. I thought the film as a whole had a very daring and quite modern sensibility in its approach to sexual content which no doubt was a French characteristic and certainly isn't something you would associate with Hollywood films of the period. The film after all is set almost entirely within the confines of a brothel with a very sleazy owner overseeing events and who quite clearly sexually abuses the women who work there as his 'entitlement' as their boss. It's quite commendably difficult material and adds quite a bit to the depth the drama mines. The wife of this appalling individual is the one with the strength and personality to hold all the other characters together and has a skill in reading Tarot cards, which is referred to in the title. Her predictions come to bear in the story, an impressive tale of doomed characters and dark obsession.