Morte num Dia de Chuva

Joel Santoni has made a handful of movies theatrically released."Mort un dimanche de pluie" was his last work before he went to make TV movies.It's also his best and one of the rare French thrillers of the eighties which seems to go somewhere.Like in the (much inferior) American "the glass house " (2001/I),an architect (Bacri) and his wife (Garcia) live in a luxury transparent house with their daughter.Enter a strange couple ,they have a daughter too:he is an one-armed man the father hires as a gardener(!);his spouse will be the daughter's nanny (who predates Rebecca DeMornay's famous part by half a decade );and the sinister couple's offspring is an absolute half-wit whose only pastime is to play a child's music box:these notes become infuriating after a while.It seems that the man lost his arm when he was working on a building site and that the architect has something to do with it.

Then it becomes a bloody violent story involving child molestation,blackmail,murders and madness.The first hour is sometimes remarkable,building a tension,a rising anxiety in the isolated mansion where the rain never stops falling.Only the scenes in the studio where Garcia works get in the way,displaying a black singer who epitomizes the worst of the eighties music ,and breaking the malefic spell. The last third is less satisfying ,verging on horror flicks such as "Friday the 13th" or even "the shining" .But there are strokes of inspiration:Nicole Garcia,running in the night in a red dress , the shrew climbing in a water tower with the two girls,or the poor idiot shedding a tear. "Mort un dimanche de pluie' has fallen into oblivion:it's all the more unfair as its ending is not what we generally expect when a whole "nice" family is involved.