Uma Estranha Mulher

Doesn't this movie have any defenders? Even Losey's biographers don't seem to be able to find a kind word for it. What I see is the work of a serene master who has left behind the trappings of drama and psychology to contemplate a world of pure cinema. Unfortunately the late masterworks of great directors are often misunderstood (see Griffith's "The Struggle", Lang's "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse", Zinnemann's "Five Days One Summer") - maybe because there isn't a critical middle ground between workaday reviewers who are unable to see beyond story and acting and academic critics who are busy applying their pet theories. In any case, it's available on a beautiful DVD and ripe for (re)discovery.

This is the Cinderella story updated to include a dysfunctional Prince Charming who is unable to satisfy his Cinderella so she has to get her jollies by seducing and outsmarting a pair of evil princes (whom she meets bowling...a wonderful surreal touch that is so improbable it actually is quite amusing...think Big Lebowski here)...the only actor out of place is Jeanne Moreau who is simply wasted in a secondary role. I will admit that I am a rabid Huppert fan and would watch her in anything...there is simply no one else like her around and she rescues this film from complete inanity by the sheer weirdness of her beautiful being.

La Truite opens to the unedifying sight of a glum-faced Isabelle Huppert squeezing sperm out of a dead fish. No prizes, then, for guessing this is a drama of sexual dysfunction. Huppert has a homosexual husband (Jacques Spiesser) who is unable to consummate their union. (Nor is he able to act, incidentally, but in a film this bad that is no grounds for divorce.)

Naive souls may imagine that a severe lack of sex explains the scowl of dour misery that Huppert tries to pass off as a performance. Not a bit of it! Her character made a vow in her teens to leech everything she could out of men - without ever once gratifying their sexual desires. So when two mega-rich businessmen (Daniel Olbrychski and Jean-Pierre Cassel) just happen to wander into her local bowling alley and find her simply irresistible...

Sorry, but I don't know which is more improbable. Members of the style-conscious haute bourgeoisie going bowling, or any person - male or female, gay or straight - becoming obsessed with Isabelle Huppert. If Losey had only shot this film with Brigitte Bardot back in the 60s (as he longed to do) then we might just about buy into its ludicrous plot. Given the sour-faced Huppert and her gaping charisma deficit, he was a fool even to try.

La Truite is a textbook illustration of the melodramatic bathos and aesthetic self-abuse that Losey could fall into when he didn't have Harold Pinter (or some other ace script-writer) to keep him in line. Only a hypnotic Jeanne Moreau (as Cassel's aging and ill-treated wife) does anything that resembles acting. Spare a thought, though, for the stunning Afro-Caribbean dancer Lisette Malidor - wasted here in a minor role. In any sane universe, she could have played Huppert's part.

In a small coastal town, the youngster Frédérique (Isabelle Huppert) works in a trout-farm. She marries the gay Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser) and they lure the upper-class businessmen Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) in the bowling, pretending that they do not play well and winning a large amount in a game, despite the protest of Rambert's wife Lou (Jeanne Moreau).

Saint-Genis invites Frédérique to travel with him in a business trip to Japan, where he has a meeting scheduled with the Japanese businessman Daigo Hamada (Isao Yamagata) and she leaves Galuchat and has a brief love affair with Saint-Genis. She returns when she is informed that her husband is in the hospital. Then Rambert tries to convince Frédérique to be his lover, with tragic consequences.

"La Truite" is a deceptive movie by Joseph Losey with a messy story that wastes a cast with the names of Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Pierre Cassel. I finished watching this pointless movie and I honestly did not understand what the point is. Further, what three old bourgeois are doing in a bowling? My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Uma Estranha Mulher" ("A Strange Woman")

In LA TRUITE Isabelle Huppert plays a cold-blooded trout of a woman, Frédérique, supported by Jeanne Moreau as a wife whose husband, Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel), throws himself (repeatedly) at Frédérique. Frédérique, who is married to a gay husband (Jacques Spiesser) agrees to accompany Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) to Tokyo, as much to annoy Rambert as to torment Saint-Genis.

The movie has many luscious sequences in Tokyo and France, and Huppert acts most of the other protagonists off the screen in a difficult role. There are flashbacks of her learning how her father and his friends used women, which increases her resolve not to be abused in similar fashion. She comes across as outwardly unsympathetic, but we understand her motives in a world where rich people treat those around them with the same lack of concern as they do their possessions. Rambert is even less sympathetic and less capable of love than Frédérique.

In this slow-moving narrative style definitely assumes more significance than content, but the film does have a particularly satisfactory ending.