Alain Jessua took a wrong turn from this movie onwards.All he did before was perfectly acceptable ("Les Chiens" "Armaguedon" and even highly commendable ("Traitement de Choc" ) Alain Jessua is one of of the rare French directors who has broached the fantasy and horror genre.In "Traitement de Choc" he tackled the absorbing subject of the fountain of youth :as it happens, the migrant workers used as "material" to rejuvenate the wealthy bourgeois ;there was something of Mary Shelley there;then in his overlooked 1981 "Le Paradis Pour Tous" ,a shrink sold a treatment-to-be-happy to his patient ,no matter if they lost their personality in the process ;this time again,Jessua showed that Man must not change Man as God or the Big Bang made him.
All that just shows how Jessua was the ideal French director to update the myth of Frankenstein.So it may have been,but if so it signally fails in his purpose .Perhaps Jessua's worst film ,this "90" version (what a stupid title!)cheapens Shelley's work with a screenplay which is a real hodgepodge that's completely unwatchable next to the director's best works.By and large , Jean Rochefort is a very reliable actor,but he is inefficient here.But if he is bad ,pop singer Eddy Mitchell is worse ,which tends to prove that singers are rarely good actors (with notable exceptions of course :Frank Sinatra;Charles Aznavour): his performance as the creature is a disaster ,but he is not the sole responsible : it's an absurd thing to make the creature speak as you and me ,to take "it" to the pictures to watch Whale's "Frankenstein" .At least ,for a very short while ,while these black and white pictures from 1931 are on the screen ,we are back in the world of true cinema.
