Gérard Blain was terminally-ill when he made his final work ,and it shows on the library pictures of the shooting:his gaunt face is that of a man who has one foot in the grave . He cast his son Paul as the hero of his film; the resemblance between father and son is striking ,and the director could not have made a better choice :Paul's hangdog look, his suffering eyes and his deep love for his family , in short, his commitment to his role are extraordinary .
The first pictures show the undertakers filling the grave:the scene lasts three minutes ;it's all the more harrowing since the actor knows that,in real life , his father's days are numbered and that he will attend this in a few months .
Paul's father was an honest man;he had discovered that his father's partner had tampered with the books of the firm , that he embezzled .And that he probably hired professional killers to do away with a man who was about to give up his job and denounce them to the police.
This looks like a thriller ,but this is not; it's another movie dealing with the father/son relationship ,a pure psychological drama ; even though Blain remained unsung ,one is in awe of the overall coherence of his whole work: from "les amis" where a young boy had an affair with a forty-something man who was as much a father substitute as a lover ,to "le pélican" where a father was denied his son's custody , to "ainsi soit-il " where a beloved father , his whole family will terribly miss ( the mother's depression, the final photograph Paul hangs on the wall which shows a happy family , the days which will never return), is killed because he knows too much.
The revenge on the cold boss is treated in admirably succint style ; the Paul/Bertrand relationship,icily impersonal ,gives goose pimples,without using the de rigueur clichés .His confederate ,a shady estate developer ,is played by a professional actor,Michel Subor who,in "le rebelle" (1980) was the hateful rich person who accepted to give the hero a job if he slept with him ; had he survived ,that's what he could have become :a puffed up smug bourgeois ,a past master in the art of wheeling and dealing.
Blain sets this corrupt rotten world against a family where love and affection are the main values ; Paul's final act ,which recalls what the hero did in "le rebelle" could be much debated : unlike in the 1980 work , the police are not hostile ,the commissaire seems determined to chastise the murderers. The hero praying in the chapel ,referring to the title , does it allow him to....?
Blain was a man of contradictions, but he was chiefly a tortured soul.
