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!)

The closest you can get to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in French is by watching Mortelle Randonnée. It's a haunted classic a stellar noir and a fatherhood fable rolled into one. You thought you got that one right, Hollywood? Let's take a trip down memory lane, thirty three years ago.

The movie is Shakespearean but mundane. It includes the best giallo murder not filmed by Argento. It does not end well. It is devastating, devastatingly so.

The original material is a pulp novel by Marc Boehm, titled The Ice Maiden. Hollywood remade it with Ashley Judd and Ewan McGregor as The Eye of the Beholder (1999, obviously losing the paternal dimension. The movie is about what you see and what to refuse to see; what you chose to see instead. Scopophilia and fantasy, spectacle and dream.

Main character The Eye (Michel Serrault, formidable), is tasked by his bitchy boss, the fantastically named Mme Schmidt-Boulanger (Genevieve Page, a monument to French diction) to follow and report on the heir of a Belgian shoe-making dynasty. He soon discovers said heir has been victim of a praying mantis (Isabelle Adjani), whose neuroses reflect his: she's lost her father and him his daughter. Only at the end of the movie those two will come across and both will die, one symbolically. A feel-good movie it is not, even though it ends on a soothing note.

The Eye is jaded by a job too easy for his capacities. One look, just one look, case closed. But the Ice Maiden proves to be a tough nut to crack, leading him off track, across Europe and within himself. His opening monologue is anything but a conventional voice-over. It deceptively sets The Eye as a man in need. He's not. It's all crosswords for him, enigmas piled on riddles. He's looking for meaning. He won't find any, or only of the darkest kind. A quantum of solace, too.

It starts in Paris by a carousel and drifts from there, under the pretense of PI work. If you speak French, the movie is delectable from start to finish : it was the last one to benefit from the work of dialog- writer Michel Audiard, father of director Jacques Audiard and author of some of the most cultish sentences in French cinema. It's the French version of screwball comedy, both elegantly written and playfully delivered. Actors here do not miss a syllable or a comma for effect. It's clockwork, respectfully served by director Claude Miller.

The Virgo, symbol of the sweetness of things is revealed as a Capricorn, symbol of winter. In the novel horoscopes played an important role and so do they in the movie. Lucie (the light), as she is first introduced, bumping on The Eye by a carousel, has no plan. She is adrift, as he is. The eye has to travel, so he will follow her, fuming but enthralled.

She seduces men and kill them singing La Paloma (the dove), another virginal deceit from a witch. There is a lot of blood on the first murder scene. The Eye decides to let it slide and they embark on a not-so-merry-go- round. She's now Eve, another maiden. She reaches the peak of her trade: "A mink! Emeralds! What a nice companion you are!" she enthused before killing a second guy she was engaged under a third name. She's a child, she has no ethics or guilt. She's a go-getter, whatever it takes.

Guilt is on The Eye's side after he kills a blind man (ha!), the Ice Maiden's true love (Sami Frey, dashing). It's a sacrifice he will regret to exert and try to cope with, to no avail. It's a zero sum game, a lost- lost. But still they go, relentlessly, from a daylight version of Malcom McLaren's Madam Butterfly video set in Baden Baden to Rome, where the sacrifice takes place.

The way it spirals downward from there is too painful to tell. A very dark comedy, Mortelle Randonnée is as venomously funny as it is tragic. It leaves a strong, bitter after-taste. One has watched this movie repeatedly and can't get tired of it. It's a tantalising object, much too dark to be watched but through the looking glass, and it's impossible to forget. Impossible to un-see.

Mortelle Randonnée is arguably one of France's best noir ever. And one of Isabelle Adjani's brightest hour. You unfortunately have to understand french to fully appreciate Michel Audiard's brilliant, darkly humorous dialogs (and especially Serreault's monologues). Claude Miller's direction is at once classy and precise (very similar to his work on L'Accompagnatrice), while Pierre Lhomme's cinematography is lush when needed, gritty when necessary (mainly during the last third). I read a few bad reviews here and there and I must add, and I know I'm not the first, that the States version, not only the recent DVD but also the TV version and the old VHS, well, has always been the truncated, 95 min. cut. Now, the movie showed everywhere else in the world runs 120 min. sharp. Think about it: it doesn't only mean that almost quarter of the movie is absent, it also means that the editing, fatally, is different, so is the rhythm, the feel, the movie altogether. I saw the DVD and frankly, while the transfer's OK, it doesn't make much of an impression, but then again, think that almost half an hour's gone. I never understood that thing with American distributors and foreign films, as if American moviegoers needed shorter, tighter movies so it won't be too much of a shock. That's ridiculous. Any moviegoer, American or whatever, that goes to the theater and buys a ticket for an Adjani/Serreault movie is obviously not looking for The Rock or Paul Walker. Well, that's what I think anyway. The rating, of course, applies to the official 120 min. version. If you have a chance to see it, don't miss it. A real gem.

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.