Friday, June 02, 2006

Summer flix fix: L’Été meurtrier

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Isabelle Adjani

  • The son of director Jacques Becker (Casque d'or; Touchez pas au grisbi; Le Trou), Jean Becker has experienced a far less remarkable career than his father, and what few films he’s done have had a hard time making it to screens outside of Europe. That is, with one very notable exception: L’Été merrier (1983), a masterful suspense/action picture released in America as One Deadly Summer.

        Woefully unavailable on region 1 DVD, it stars Isabelle Adjani as a manipulative and alluring young woman with skeletons rattling loudly in the closet. Brazen and promiscuous, she sidesteps empathy and compassion to get what she wants in a sleepy provincial town. Becker lets his story unfold gradually, as an examination of a sexual monster created out of criminal violence, now in the process of extracting her revenge.

        To reveal anything else would be unfair. L’Été merrier is an artfully rigged exercise in tension, of innocence lost and people held accountable for their digressions. It’s also Adjani at her seductive best, and evidence that Jean Becker understood the power of ego, desire and lust.


    • Gallery
    Click images to enlarge

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    Adjani with Suzanne Flon

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    Adjani with Alain Souchon (right)

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    posted by Ray Young at 3:23 PM

    1 Comments:

    Blogger Maxim de Winter said...

    A footnote: this is based, very faithfully if I recall correctly, on a novel by the woefully neglected French writer Sebastian Japrisot (he also wrote The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun, which has been filmed at least twice and is even better than its title). Most recently, his last and finest novel was travestied by the director of Amelie (oh all right, I haven't been able to bring myself to see it, knowing in advance about some of the changes they've made to the original story). Well worth investigating if you ever come across his work in a secondhand bookshop.

    10:20 AM EST  

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