Le passager de la pluie

I read somewhere that "Rider on the Rain" was Charles Bronson's favorite of all the movies that he made. I don't really understand that. He made quite a few better movies than this one. It has taken me several viewings of this film to begin to appreciate it. "Rider on the Rain" is almost a really good movie. It has a nice vibe to it. Bronson and the dreamy Marlene Jobert work well together. The movie is a little bit too long and gets a little confusing at times. The music is hit and miss. Although "Ride on the Rain" doesn't quite hit the mark for me, I do find myself watching it every once in a while. Just for the record, I enjoyed this movie tonight more than I have in the past.

I find it hard to say why exactly but I liked this film. It was well made, well acted and different enough that it wasn't the usual predictable Hollywood pulp. I'd recommend it for anyone who has more than a few brain cells to rub together as at least a refreshing change of pace that shows films can be both different and entertaining.

Charles Bronson has a reputation for making mostly the other kinds of films so this is very different for him. The French spin adds something hard to define but enjoyable. The female lead is wonderful to watch too.

I found I really enjoyed the sets and locations and, yes, especially the rain. Perhaps rain overdoes some moodiness in a way but I find I love to see a film with rain in it as a backdrop. Maybe that comes from living in a place where I rarely see and real rain.

Nevertheless, I'd buy this if I could find it locally, especially if it was on wide format DVD. I don't think anyone who was behind the project gave it enough support when it was a new film (I originally saw it in an "art house" cinema) and I certainly don't think the mainstream types will support it now. I think it's a rare gem of film making and deserves to be preserved, owned and watched by lots of new people. I'll keep looking for it along with other rare but obscure gems I'd love to own.

Considering its huge success in France and much of Europe at the time of its release, René Clément's Le Passager de la Pluie/Rider on the Rain (which also won the golden globe award for best foreign film) has been relatively forgotten. Yet, after 50 years, the film remains a highly original, captivating thriller, filled with peculiar imagery, symbolism and suspenseful mystery. Though it has some Hitchcockian influences and makes some homages to the great master of suspense, it is really a unique mystery, unlike anything made before or after it. From its moody opening sequence in the rain, to a chilling rape scene, the film develops into an idiosyncratic intrigue, that entices the viewer largely thanks to the interactions between its two magnetic main characters, played by Marlene Jobert and Charles Bronson, both on their way to become two of the most popular stars in France at the time. The two enjoy amazing chemistry, as Bronson tries by any means to get Jobert to admit that she has killed the man who raped her and Jobert does her best to outmaneuver him. Though this cat and mouse game goes on for most of the film, the viewer's attention is maintained through some interesting plot twists and imaginative dialogue that has some amusing recurring themes. The beautifully melancholic musical score by Francis Lai greatly contributes to the strangeness of it all. What makes the story particularly meaningful, however, is that the central plot is clearly an allegory for Jobert's character's subconscious and conscious struggle as a fragile, repressed and dominated young woman, who through traumatic events, manages to eventually confront her demons and assert herself. In this sense, despite the abusive treatment of her character (interestingly named Melancholy), the film is arguably well in tune with the rising feminism of the period. Marlene Jobert's superb performance is key to the film's success. She is very convincing and charming in her girlish portrayal of this modern Alice in Wonderland, effectively conveying innocence, confusion, fright, hysteria, sadness, and a range of other emotions. Meanwhile, Charles Bronson is excellent as her enigmatic pursuer and saviour, whose real motives are not clear until more than halfway through the film. Bronson, who had recently become an international star with Once Upon a Time in the West, plays his usual tough guy persona, but with more depth and intelligence than most of the roles that would follow. Ultimately, Le Passager de la Pluie works thanks to the performances of this duo, which is maybe why it is not more remembered. Unfortunately, Jobert became much less active in films from the 1980s, while Bronson became increasingly associated with a vengeful, violent persona, rather removed from the more interesting character he plays here. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the French version of the film is more satisfying that the English one, where every-one except Bronson is dubbed, mainly because the dialogue works better in its original language.

Here are some background facts about Rider on the Rain -it's my all-time favorite: I saw it many times in Philly during its initial release and bought a 16mm print from Avco Embassy in the '70s to study it, doing a shot-by-shot analysis.

CLEMENT: Director René Clément, an avowed Hitchcock admirer, in a book of essays about his own work (unfortunately never translated from French) stressed the importance of detail -little items of design, recurring motifs, repeated camera moves, as the essence of his cinema. Repeated viewings of Rider reward one with these carefully set up details that go beyond the usual surface effects (without Spoilers, watch for the shtick with the walnuts, subtle camera moves, and esp. the careful obscuring or revealing of objects in the frame, e.g., by the bus early on, or the camera angles of the body removal scene). He was a master director, winning 2 Foreign Film Oscars with diverse classics including Gervaise, Forbidden Games, Purple Noon, Battle of the Rails, Monsieur Ripois and The Walls of Malapaga, as well as one ripe for rediscovery -The Sea Wall. His love of detail is on full display in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (Clément was technical adviser). It's no coincidence that the mysterious title character in Rider is named Mac Guffin as a Hitchcock nod, well-played by the sinister Marc Mazza.

JAPRISOT: The screenwriter, whose pen name was an anagram of his real moniker, based this script on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, opening the film with a perfect table-setting quote: Either the well was too deep, or she fell very slowly..., which explains heroine Mellie's adventure to come. Known for A Very Long Engagement, his other recommended films include the very clever Isabelle Adjani thriller One Deadly Summer, and the very odd film of his novel The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, directed by Anatole Litvak. Lady features perhaps the longest flashback scene used as an explanation in a film's denouement, even outdoing the flashbacks that were the basis of the Barry Newman TV series Petrocelli or even the current Lost series.

BRONSON: Rider was a key film in Charles Bronson's career -a huge hit all over Europe and his breakthrough as a star, after gaining int'l success in ensemble casts for Once Upon a Time in the West and The Dirty Dozen, as well as Far East popularity opposite Alain Delon in So Long, Friend. His name in the cast is Col. Dobbs, but on the soundtrack and colloquially in France his character was known just as The American (see soundtrack LP for The American's Theme), becoming something of an iconic figure. His assurance, mysterious manner and (as Charles Laughton once praised him) great presence/center of gravity on screen add immeasurably to the film. I met him once in NYC while interviewing Michael Winner during the filming of a Death Wish sequel, and Bronson at the time was planning to do an American remake of Rider on the Rain for Cannon Films but it never happened. For the French language version of Rider his role was dubbed by expatriate blacklisted director John Berry, and there has always been a debate over the value of the French vs. English soundtrack version of Rider (Bronson dubbed vs. rest of cast dubbed; analogous to Burt Lancaster in the 2 versions of Visconti's The Leopard).

JOBERT: Marlene Jobert was the most popular gamin actress in France at the time, having starred in L'Astragale (a remarkable true story adapted from the novel by the woman who lived it, Albertine Sarrazin), and went on to make unsuccessful international films but one classic, Maurice Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together, which I saw at the NY Film Festival with her in attendance. She is central to Rider's success and was lauded by Judith Crist in a rave review when it came out. There is a great scene near the end of the film with plenty of Alice in Wonderland atmosphere when she is taken by prostitute Marika Green to see Corinne Marchand (the iconic French actress/chanteuse of Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7), in which Clément makes great effect of the height differential between the women. Jobert met and married Marika's brother Walter and their daughter is French star Eva Green of James Bond fame, an interesting followup to the Rider casting. Another more famous singer, Belgian star Annie Cordy, plays Jobert's mother in Rider, and it spring-boarded her acting career.

FRANCIS LAI: The soundtrack album (well worth hunting for) enshrines one of Lai's best and for me most memorable scores, truly indispensable to amplifying the strange, rainy day, off-season in a Riviera resort town mood of this unique film. Best known at the time for his A Man and a Woman score, he did Love Story soon after Rider.

SERGE SILBERMAN: The producer of Rider was a great filmmaker, now little remembered (outside of France) since his death. I got to interview him during one of his lesser efforts, filming James Toback's Exposed with Rudolf Nureyev in NYC (I appear unpaid as an extra in that film, one even Toback booster Pauline Kael couldn't love). Besides the 5 later films of Luis Bunuel he produced, Silberman has his share of other all-time classics as producer, not by accident: Melville's Bob le flambeur, Jacques Becker's Le Trou, Beineix's Diva and Kurosawa's Ran. It's an amazing track record spanning a career of only a couple dozen films.

I finally tracked down a copy of this rare gem on VHS here in T.O. and what can I say, this is an underrated and unique piece of fimmaking. I don't believe there's been anything like it before or since. The best use of Bronson's action hero persona since "Once Upon a Time in the West". It really is a shame that in the thirty plus years of Bronson's film career that he never found anything approaching this quality. Intelligently written and beautifully filmed, the movie resembles something of a photographed play with the lovely Marlene Jobert and Charlie squaring off in an unusual cat and mouse tale almost entirely consisting of their two characters during its' running time. I am officially begging either Anchor Bay or Blue Underground or whoever to produce a widescreen DVD of this little known film treasure.