ONE DEADLY SUMMER (L'Ete Meurtrier, 1983)

If my selection of movies seems random to the point of incoherence, that's because I often don't know in advance what I'm going to watch in a given week. Blame that on the Albany Public Library, whose ever-growing selection of foreign films inspires many "What the hell is this? Let's take a look!" moments. One of the library's newest acquisitions is a film that won four Cesar awards, France's answer to the Oscars, including the Best Actress award to star Isabelle Adjani. It's the work of Jean Becker, a second-generation director whose work has been unknown to me. The box cover promises an erotic revenge story with some serious twists, and I've seen the film described as a prototype erotic thriller. I can see the point; set aside the rural French setting and the full frontal nudity and this could be the plot of a Lifetime Original Movie.

Adjani is Elaine, the 19 year old daughter (the actress was 28) of a crippled father and a German mother. They've just moved into the sort of small town where the dance hall has no air conditioning, where the nearest cinema is so far away that kids fall asleep on the trip back, and people will call a German woman "Eva Braun." Elaine is the typical seductive newcomer who insinuates her way into an unsuspecting family. In the typical Lifetime saga this character convinces everyone of her benevolence before her mask slips to revel Evil beneath. In One Deadly Summer there's hardly a mask because Elaine is clearly unstable from the beginning. There's a kind of belligerence to her seductiveness, as if she were asking an aroused populace, "Are you not seduced?" She flaunts her eminently flauntable body indiscriminately, and nearly everyone in sight is a potential erotic target. The situation is made all the more provocative because this backward burg is a place where there's not a lot of indoor plumbing. Elaine will drag her portable bathtub into her new family's kitchen to draw a bath, then strip naked and take a soak in full view of her future mother-in-law -- the one person who's outright hostile toward her. She is way too intimate, still inclined to nurse at her mother's breast in needy moments. She also has screaming fits in restaurants and has a savantish knack for adding large numbers together. And if that's not the mark of a lunatic I don't know what is.

When she seduces our hero Pin-Pon (a quaint nickname; he has a brother named Boubou), who narrates much of the story, you assume she has an ulterior motive for faking a pregnancy and so on, and so she does. She's really interested in the family's barrel organ, which it acquired back in 1955. The timing matters, because Elaine's mother was raped by a gang of movers who were transporting just such an instrument back in that year. That's how Elaine came to be (the film is set in 1976, which may have been when the source novel was written), and it has complicated her own family life ever since. Dad has never granted her his own family name despite his clear affection for her, and that almost guarantees that his affection could develop in the bad-touch direction. In fact, he happens to be crippled because he did get a little bad-touchy toward innocent glasses-wearing Elaine a few years back, only to have her answer his affection by cracking his skull with a shovel.

Strangely enough, you can see how this may have inspired her own predatory manner of seduction, which she's also applied to her female schoolteacher, a hapless woman who still carries a torch for her -- she gives Elaine a cigarette lighter for a wedding present with the inscription, "Let me be your flame." Our antiheroine proposes to seduce her way into the confidences of the two surviving rapists of 1955; the third, Pin-Pon's father, is already dead. Her father convinced her mother never to press charges against them, and Elaine's idea of making up to both of them is to track down these rapists, now small businessmen in their own rights, and destroy them.

Elaine's grandiose revenge plot doesn't quite work out. That's because she doesn't know the whole story of her mother's rape. The revelation of the truth is a shattering moment for her fragile psyche. Her entire life from a certain point has been dedicated to a certain purpose, and once that purpose is rendered irrelevant it's as if all those years never happened. We last see her regressed to the mental state of a nine-year old, after nine troubled days of marriage to poor Pin-Pon, whose noirish narration (e.g. "I was about to make the worst mistake of my life.") has not prepared us for a final tragic twist in the tale. Earlier, about to carry out her revenge plan, she'd left a message for him explaining everything -- as she then wrongly understood it. But he doesn't know that she's been proven wrong. In fact, he assumes that she's in that hopelessly regressed state because she failed in her purpose. So what does he owe his love if not revenge?...

As I've hinted by equating it with Lifetime movies, the story of L'Ete Meurtrier has to be told carefully to avoid coming out hopelessly camp. I'm not sure if Jean Becker fully succeeds in dodging all the pitfalls, but I don't know if any writer or director could. The story is so full of extremes that it can never be taken seriously by everyone. It doesn't seem like the kind of film that wins French awards, but it has one powerful thing going for it. Of course, that's Isabelle Adjani.

I wasn't confident in her at first. Yes, she was hot on sight, even before the clothes came off, but there was a vacuous quality in her early scenes that made her an unlikely ruthless avenger. But by her scene in the restaurant with Pin-Pon (a game effort by pop star Alain Souchon) she had sold me on Elaine's madness. She never turns into a calculating villain, and she never fully loses that vacuous quality, but what we see isn't stupidity but a real and alarming void where something more humane should be. If anything, Adjani comes on too strong, since Pin-Pon and his fellow villagers don't catch on to her lunacy until well after the audience has. But the story really needs her to go over the top, because hers is a kind of madness that spreads like a disease, something the film itself conveys by sharing the voiceover track among several narrators, some commenting in past tense, some expressing their thoughts in real time. This fractured narration keeps us questioning who knows what at any given point in the story. That's what separates One Deadly Summer from the TV movies that superficially resemble it. Those potboilers too quickly dismiss their antagonists as Evil outsiders whose removal can restore a benign normality, while Becker's film shows a woman whose madness was shaped by the world around her and will affect others after she leaves the scene.

One Deadly Summer is a film I can recommend both to arthouse enthusiasts and to fans of the wilder world of cinema. Adjani's performance is sure to impress both groups, perhaps for different reasons. As for the movie as a whole, I can only wonder which faction of fans will like it more....

There's no trailer available online, so the DVD distributor, BayViewEntertainment, has uploaded a short collection of clips to YouTube.

DIABOLICALLY YOURS (Diaboliquement Votre, 1967)

You wake up in a hospital one morning and learn that you've been in a coma following a car accident. You discover that you are Alain Delon, at least in physical terms. Your name, the doctors tell you, is Georges Campos, and your lovely wife, who in physical terms is Senta Berger, is waiting to bring you home. And what a home! Apparently you are a millionaire, at least in francs. You own a mansion and a Buick. You have a vaguely Asiatic looking servant, and it looks like you made your fortune in Hong Kong. You don't remember? That's too be expected; you had a very bad accident. But it's not like that. True, you don't remember your name or if you're married or not, but you do remember some people like your pal Freddie, the doctor who's prescribed a strict regiment of plenty of sleep, plenty of pills, and no sex with the wife until your memory's back. And the more you remember, the more you still don't remember being Georges Campos or being married to the beautiful Christiane. That is, you wouldn't if not for the voices you hear in the night that sound pretty certain that you are, indeed, Georges Campos the corrupt businessman and all-around meanie. After a while, they also seem pretty certain that you ought to kill yourself. Maybe that would be the right thing to do, given what you've learned about yourself, and the fact that your dog hates you, except for those other flashbacks to another life altogether and the echo of another name: Pierre Lagrange....

That's the predicament Delon finds himself facing in the final film directed by Julien Duvivier. He's probably best known for Pepe le Moko, a big early hit for Jean Gabin that was remade in the U.S. as Algiers, a big early hit for Charles Boyer. Duvivier fled to the U.S. during WW2 and most prominently made the portmanteau films Tales of Manhattan and Flesh and Fantasy. In the last year of his life the 70 year old director made a vivid and sometimes campy psychological thriller that has strong film noir elements and touches of expressionism. It gets a bit clunky toward the end when we finally have to have the plot explained, but what carries us through is Alain Delon's performance and the sexual tension between him and Berger, who together may form part of a triangle or quadrilateral.

Duh, how do you say femme fatale in French? Senta Berger enjoys the attentions of the actually-German Peter Mosbacher as Kim.

Delon is likably irreverent here. You can tell very early that despite whatever real amnesia the character suffers, he isn't buying the scenario for a second. The character comes off rather like a wisecracking American noir hero, repeatedly calling Kim the vaguely Asian servant "Chairman Mao." The situation may just be too good for him to believe, but "Georges" isn't quite a tabula rasa, and some subconscious cynicism or survival instinct may be warning him about the truth. Delon's irreverence or insolence sets up a contrast for his later uncertainty about his sanity as the mansion starts seeming more like a haunted house and his flashbacks become more stylistically jarring.

Expressionist and other touches from director Duvivier and cinematographer Henri Decae

The plot, once revealed, seems a little over-elaborate, and some details probably would have been better off left mysterious. It can't help but be a clunker of a moment when Delon discovers that the voices in the night are coming from a good-sized tape recorder stuck between his mattresses. But the sexual tension among the four main characters transcends the sometimes creaky plot mechanics, and the payoff when Delon defies doctor's orders and does it with Berger is undiluted by the implausibility of the core conspiracy. Duvivier exits on a minor but graceful note, ably assisted by Delon and Berger. It's no great ultimate statement, and I doubt that Duvivier had anything like that in him. It's just a last modest confirmation (on top of the few other films I've seen from him) of his skill at making entertaining films.

A cinematic pun? Diaboliquement Votre was Delon's first film after Le Samourai, but unlike in Jean-Pierre Melville's crime masterpiece the actor sort of dresses like a samurai here.

Here's a jazzy French trailer with plenty of male chauvanist mayhem, uploaded to YouTube by Annie7676: