Morti sospette

Although screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere is best-known for his close association with Luis Bunuel during the last 20 years of the latter's life which produced some of his greatest and best-loved work, he did not work exclusively within art-house circles or with highbrow material. Indeed, he was as prone to adapt for the screen famous literary pieces as he was pulp fiction. In fact, between 1969 and 2001, he worked 11 times with one of French cinema's expert purveyors of crime thrillers, Jacques Deray – although, to be sure, even this significant collaboration included forays into Balzac and Zweig! Anyway, BORSALINO (1970) was Deray's most popular film and that was co-scripted with Carriere as was the star-studded U.S.-based thriller THE OUTSIDE MAN (1972). To counter the cheeky machismo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the gloomy romanticism of Alain Delon, there came the brooding intelligence and, on occasion, the sheer brute force of Lino Ventura; he had debuted in Jacques Becker's GRISBI (1954) in a supporting role as the villain of the piece but soon graduated to leading roles as the anti-heroic gangster on the run of Claude Sautet's excellent CLASSE TOUS RISQUES aka THE BIG RISK (1960) and the patriotic leader of the French Resistance of Jean-Pierre Melville's marvelous ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969). A measure of the world-weariness of the roles he generally played can be gleaned from the knowledge that, even though he worked and lived for most of his life in France, the Italian-born Ventura never applied for French citizenship!

The film under review is a slow-burning but eminently satisfying Kafkaesque thriller with Hitchcockian overtones in which a man (Ventura) disembarks into a Spanish port and, when checking in at his usual hotel, hears some groans coming from the next apartment and gets knocked out cold for trying to be a good Samaritan. He wakes up in a strangely deserted rest home whose only inhabitants seem to be an inquisitive mousey psychiatrist, a flabby janitor and an elderly patient forever speaking to a butterfly on his shoulder which is, Harvey-like, visible only to himself. Returning once again to collect his things from the hotel, he happens to overhear a conversation between the concierge and the dead man's wife (Laura Betti) and, when he offers to help in clearing up the mystery, she is run down by a speeding car – but not before having passed on to Ventura a key to a luggage locker. The "McGuffin" in this case is a suitcase which everybody – from the psychiatrist to the anonymous villains (including the aforementioned janitor) who keep contacting Ventura on the phone and even seemingly sympathetic stranger Claudine Auger – clearly craves and are not above kidnapping Ventura's wife (future director Nicole Garcia) and, ultimately, having him shot by an unseen sniper at the film's very end. Carriere's Bunuelian credentials crop up intermittently during Ventura's hallucinations at the beginning that see him walking down the corridors of the rest-home and pushing the doors open to be met inside by the hotel victim, the butterfly patient and, eventually, himself!

"Un Papillon Sur L'épaule" is a quiet thriller which depicts why an honest man always gets involved in shady deals. It allows us to question whether it is due to unforeseen circumstances which force an honest man to go astray or is it something in an honest man's disposition that he cannot evade dangers. According to this film,the plight of the honest man is really strange as despite all heroic fights, he is the one who emerges as the ultimate loser. There is hardly anything in his control to change events and circumstances as he is merely a puppet as the strings are with somebody else. In this film, Jacques Deray has made an effective use of dream, hallucination and reality to portray a hapless man whose destiny is crisscrossed by these very elements. Lino Ventura gives a very restrained performance in his role of an ordinary French citizen who loses his life in a hostile Spain.Although actress Nicole Garcia has a very limited role, she manages to garner viewers' sympathy as the wife of a man who directs all possible efforts in rescuing her husband from the clutches of invisible forces.

This film starts out like a lot of espionage thrillers: an innocent man witnesses a murder and finds himself mixed up in a deadly intrigue of spies and counter-spies. A movie of this sort can easily become infuriatingly complicated or just plain silly. At worst it can be both, as for example Jacques Deray's earlier spy thriller "Avec la peau des autres", which also starred Lino Ventura.

"Un papillon sur l'épaule" works better because it never fully gives up its mystery. We know that something sinister is afoot and we can make some intelligent guesses, but the thing is never spelled out for us. Lino Ventura is like Alice (a paunchy, middle-aged Alice) who tumbles down a rabbit-hole and wakes up in a world that's not quite the same as before, where no-one believes him or can explain what's happening and where innocuous-looking strangers suddenly take on a menacing significance.

The white rabbit of this particular looking-glass world is played by Claudine Auger, a slinky spy who keeps whizzing up in a battered car to dispense gnomic advice and warnings. Paul Crauchet, who acted with Ventura nine years earlier in Melville's "L'Armée des ombres", plays a lunatic in pyjamas with an imaginary talking butterfly on his shoulder and a scarecrow in his bed.

It sounds bizarre and it is, but I liked it. Ventura, who starred in plenty of espionage thrillers in his career, is believable and sympathetic; the Spanish locations are used to great effect; and Jacques Deray's assured direction feeds the suspense and paranoia, his camera peering around corners and through doorways and windows (one murder is witnessed through revolving doors). An enjoyable thriller and a must-see for Ventura fans.

American-born John Gearon wrote his first novel 'The Velvet Well' in 1946 before adopting the pseudonym John Flagg. More that thirty years later and eight years after the author's demise we have this version directed by Jacques Deray, best known for his films with Alain Delon. Another of Deray's regular collaborators, the brilliant Jean-Claude Carriere, has written the screenplay.

To call this a 'loose' adaptation would be an understatement and it is futile to dwell on the differences as they are considerable. It is no less effective for that and I would have to say that of this director's output, with the exception of 'Un Crime', this is the one that had me gripped from the outset.

It really belongs to the 'neo-polar' genre in which one never knows who the villains are or whom to trust. Here the man living the Kafkaesque nightmare is the Roland Feriaud of Lino Ventura. He happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as a result of which he is severely concussed and awakes to find himself in a 'clinic' staffed by one doctor and one nurse. The doctor seems less concerned with Feriaud's health than with the whereabouts of a certain suitcase. This suitcase becomes the MacGuffin, the contents of which are never revealed but which various parties will go to any lengths to obtain, including the kidnap of Feriaud's wife.

The tempo is lento throughout and there is very little music so it takes a very special actor with enormous presence to hold our attention and here Lino Ventura fits the bill perfectly. Excellent support from Nicole Garcia, Claudine Auger and Laura Betti with a marvellous turn by Paul Crauchet whose character's surreal obsession gives the film its title.

By all accounts the novel once attracted the attention of Hollywood. Heaven only knows how it would have turned out but one thing is certain. The bizarre elements of Carriere's screenplay and the film's final scene would have been inconceivable to American film makers of that time. Vive la différence!

Let me get this straight. I'm a huge Ventura's fan. I love every single movie he's even been in. Every single movie but this one, that is. I've found very frustrating not to understand the first thing about the plot. What is this movie all about? Spies? Secret war? State secrets? Traffic? We have no clue. So you keep watching it, thinking that sooner or later you may have the key to understand why you've stayed this far. Only the key never come, giving the whole movie a sense of emptiness that I've never experiences before. So if you want to lose your time, to feel frustrated and empty, go for it. If you want a head and tail movie though, you'll have to go elsewhere, for there is no such simple thing herein.