Alain Jessua is certainly the most underrated and the most overlooked of the post N.V. French directors .Brash,courageous,intelligent,adventurous and exciting,he was all this and more in his heyday (roughly from his debut to "Paradis Pour Tous" ):6 movies in total ,which is not much but all are original and different from all that was made in the sixties/seventies in France.
When I was a little boy,I wanted to be Tintin,and to live his life of adventures.
Bob,in "Jeu De Massacre " ,might have registered the same desire ,but his dreams have never faded away and now nearing thirty , when he meets two cartoonists (the man writes the scripts,the wife draws),he tells them he's been thru all the stories they have invented:as soon as he appears on the screen ,we feel how irrational Bob is .Michel Duchaussoy -who would be in two other Jessua movies:" Traitement De Choc" and "Armaguedon" as well as in some of Chabrol's best : "Que La Bête Meure" -his best part,IMO- and "La Rupture" - gives a tormented feverish performance;when he tells his imaginary adventures ,he uses the "Passé Simple" ,a tense you would not use in a conversation: it creates a gap between the narrator and what he is telling .
Bob has an over possessive wealthy mother with whom he lives in Switzerland in a desirable mansion by the Leman Lake .He invites the two artists who have understood that they can make money out of this mythomania .Next step will be writing a brand new comic strip which introduces a new hero ,some kind of "Super Bob" .It won't be long before the rich kid wants to become this superman .Little by little,the writer's wife,who draws the strip (the drawings are terribly dated ,Barbarella style ,but it inspires Bob's vital extremism)begins to feel like becoming herself the heroine of the story and she creates Helen ,Bob's partner in crime.But soon,being on the paper won't be enough...
Very ambitious,not always successful,easy to admire ,but not very palatable,"Jeu De massacre" introduces a disturbed hero whose inflated ego knows no bounds ;Jessua would treat the subject again with "Armaguedon" in which a man ,holding some second-rate position ,tries to draw the crowds' attention with bomb scares .
Who has never dreamed he became the hero of a movie,of a comic strip or a novel? If you hang on to this dream,you'll never grow up;and you know how it is painful growing up.
