Malevil

This is for me not an anticipation film, despite the fact that it takes place after a nuclear attack, a common topic for many movies of the early eighties, I guess after MAD MAX and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK success. MALEVIL is more a character and social study than anything else. It is a bit complex but the lines, possibilities of readings, are numerous, the audiences have a large choice among all the things they can say about this film. It is of course pretty interesting to watch, analyze, especially for a French film, very daring and the presence of the likes as Michel Serrault, Jean Louis Trintignant emphasizes the quality of this unusual and tremendous movie. I have not yet read the novel which it is inspired from, so I won't speak of the adaptation. Awesome settings from the French mountains, landscape, wilderness.

I'm a lifelong and ardent fan of Robert Merle, the writer who thought up Malevil, genre close to "Les Hommes Protégés" when he wasn't writing his historical classic saga "Fortune de France". The story I used to read many times over is something I was always curious about how they'd put it on celluloid... khmmm... coulda been far better... I think the main problem is that it lacks any real background to the main characters, their 'previos life' their place in the micro-society of the typical rural France countryside.

A spicy choice of brilliant actors (Trintignant as Fulbert, Serrault the Squire and Villeret as Momo) should've been given MUCH more credit than this. I just don't know why this movie went awry - looooong, boring and leaving holes unanswered in the story - maybe it was only intended to be a cheapo TV-film, poorly budgeted variant. If you see the movie first you'll never want to read the book, if you read the book first you'd be disappointed by the movie.

In southern France, in a quite little town, the mayor, who also owns a castle with some cattle, is in the wine cellar with some other people: the pharmacist, the veterinary, and some of his employees. As they are drinking wine, they hear a terrible noise and the heat's getting higher and higher.

They don't realise what's happening: when they come out of the cellar, they realise that everything has burned, and all the buildings are destroyed...

The movie has a classic plot: after the apocalypse, some survivors try to build again a new life, trying to cultivate the land to eat, they also have to defend themselves against some others survivors who try to steel their food... The actors are really good (like Michel Serrault or the singer Jacques Dutronc) and it's really well directed. The director of photography has done a excellent job to: the painting of the post-apocalytic landscapes is really brilliant...

Quite a good movie in fact, although it's a little to long

Post-apocalyptic drama envisions in calm and bleak images the social and political implications of a life in a totally uprooted world, basically a pessimistic film that gives hope only in an ambiguous open ending.

By now you've seen it all before, but in the 80s, several films like this appeared, banking on the fears of the possibility of a very real nuclear war and they felt fresh. Funny how that wheel turns, heh, 2022?

Anyway, some people are in a wine cellar when a nuke blows their village away. They manage to survive and then they meet the "others" which of course are antagonistic. They solve the problem, but then, instead of going full The Walking Dead, the film goes in another direction. I found that ending added a lot to the film, although it was kind of subtle.

While some scenes are very good, some lines really deep and the dark exploration of human nature in times of crisis quite realistic, I couldn't really enjoy the slow pace, the mentally handicapped 30 year old and his almost senile mother or the religious cult controlled by an evil nobody who created the drama. Trintignant was always good, but he couldn't make this shine.

Funny enough there seems to be a 2009 remake, also French, which almost didn't see the light of day. It was released directly to TV in France after4 years from its completion. I don't know if the book is any better, but from what I read, it's better to just watch this 1981 film instead.

Bottom line: a combination of good acting and nice writing, but marred by a slow pace and really unsympathetic characters.