Mia dolce assassina

Mortelle randonée is a brilliant and somewhat noir-ish thriller with a subtle twist of comedy. Isabelle Adjani's beauty has never been more glowing than here as the central femme fatale, and Michel Serrault manages to be both touching and very funny as the lonesome private eye, in search of a long lost daughter. As an added bonus Carla Bley's sexy and jazzy score is simply stunning and makes this overlooked gem a definite must-see. Director Claude Miller has had a long impressive career – he started out working for Truffaut – but only rarely has his work been this relaxed, cool and yet still magnificently melodramatic. The inferior "Eye of the Beholder" (1999) was based on the same novel (and Ewan McGregor was way to young for the part). The Wellspring DVD contains only heavily edited American release and this version simply doesn't work. Wait for someone to release this wonderful film uncut.(actually TF1 already have - with French subtitles only!)

...and still does now that I am 42. Serrault and Adjani (an improbable 'incestuous couple' at a first glance, but actually a dreamy duo which really works) are just great. They both look like zombies: two people who died a long time ago and who consider life as a sort of waiting room. They only want to step back into the black&white school photo, when everything was still OK and life worth living. The story verges on the side of madness from the beginning, with Mrs Schmidt-Boulanger (manager of detective agency - beautiful cameo for Geneviève Page, who was the Madam in Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour'). While she's explaining the case to Beauvoir (the detective), he watches dreamily a homeless smashing a window of Schmidt-Boulanger's car, stealing her fur coat and putting it on, parading around on the parking lot, like a model on the catwalk. And the music! Another improbable couple: Carla Bley and Schubert! And the dialogs! Michel and Jacques Audiard wrote one little gem after another. And the black humor! Just sit back, don't expect any believable plot, and ENJOY this little gem from the 80's!

There's a private detective who keeps an old b/w photo with him. It shows a class of little girls and one of them is his daughter but he doesn't know which one so they're all his daughter. There's a mysterious girl, beautiful and a little sad, she goes around changing names and wigs and killing rich men (but not for their money, the money only the means by which she can sustain herself until she can kill again) and she tells outrageous made-up stories about a father she probably never met. The movie sets itself up as something potentially quirky, a noir patchwork where the dialogue is witty, a corpse is dumped in a lake, and the private dick tails the mysterious woman from murder to murder.

It's around that point when the movie must decide the course, when the crime mystery begins to dissolve into something irrelevant because the private dick is not trying to catch her any more, in fact he starts erasing her traces and lying to his boss, and he calls her "Marie", the name of his long lost daughter, so that we're not asking whys anymore but rather staring obsession straight in the eye. This newfound surrogate daughter becomes a compulsion but it only starts there. It gets confusing, almost surreal like characters can foresee things, but it's an interesting confusion for me because the latenight atmosphere is right and something intuitive is suggested between the two protagonists. It's like we're in the cavelike gloom of a hotel staircase and the plot is used like an oil lamp that serves to increase that gloom and mystery for us and we can't tell at once what is going on on the top floor until we're halfway up there.

At one point there's a TV showing FW Murnau's The Last Laugh and the girl begins fashioning another madeup tale about her father, tailored this time after Emil Janning's hotel porter character in Murnau's movie, the tale is outrageous and weepy like bad melodrama but it's the telling that makes it poignant, like the magnitude of the lie suggests the depth of what is broken. Michel Serrault's private detective is one of the most fascinating movie characters of the 80's, he's methodical in his work but also a little detached from everything around him like Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlow in The Long Goodbye, and the only thing that keeps him going is the pursuit of obsession. Right down to the amazingly sad ending, Mortelle Randonnee is a forgotten gem, a little flawed around the edges and the details sometimes go out of focus like we're in a car and the view from the window is blurred but we stop at places and bizarre things happen there (often at gunpoint) and then we're on the move again, and it's that neon- lit blur of something sad and desperate that makes it fascinating.

The French love for American crime novels has been written about many times. Jim Thompson's works have been adapted by many of the leading directors. Truffaut's early career was based largely on this genre; he made Shoot the Pianist from David Goodis's novel, and many of Chabrol's films are taken from American pulp. Claude Miller made his second film Dites-lui que je l'aime from Patricia Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness.

In Mortelle Randonnee, Miller is working with Marc Behm's novel The Eye of the Beholder, which I haven't read. I suppose Miller chose to throw out most of the plot elements of Behm's book; that's the usual practice in France. The theme of obsessional love of a man for the girl he believes to be his daughter is triumphantly brought to life by a great cast, aided by Carla Bley's richly melancholic music (post-modern brass band?), Pierre Lhomme's lovely camera-work (those rain-slicked night shots, the sad neon lights on hotel fronts), the expert choice of sets (Helmut Newton would have loved that German health spa where Catherine meets the lesbian Cora).

Finally, the wonderful cast: Michel Serrault so wistful as the private investigator preparing an endless series of cover-ups of Adjani's killings, he's as good here as he was in Garde à vue; Isabelle Adjani living on her jangled nerves as she criss-crosses Europe in search of new prey; Geneviève Page (who I remember from Belle de jour--the brothel keeper) as the crisp director of the detective agency Serrault works for; the startling transformation of the gorgeous Stéphane Audran into a homely housewife--what a makeup job--who is also tracking Adjani. The last act is darker and more anguished than the preceding ones, the viewer will have to resist the urge to ask what happened to the comic bits.

One of the best movies ever. Very dark, very deadpan, perfect acting. Great script, too.

The La Paloma version in the blind man's villa is by Hans Albers.