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The abstruse symbolism (reptiles, viscous ponds, elevators) serves André Téchiné's bravura technique for a noir panorama, less a Gallic version of the American paranoia of The Parallax View or Night Moves than an update of Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle. The formalist element is introduced early with a tracking shot that frames the young pugilist (Gérard Depardieu) between the ropes of the ring, the oneiric element is cemented as he is shot through the café window during a flurry of artificial snow. It's election time, the boxer and his girlfriend (Isabelle Adjani) find themselves with a satchel full of money and sinister parties on their trail after a murky "electoral trick." Jean-Claude Brialy is the bigwig who gives his blessing to torture by sauna, Marie-France Pisier plies her trade in a Red Light District-style display room, equipped with cradle and bawling baby. "You believe in reincarnation?" The protagonist's role is taken over by the hired killer (Depardieu, now with shoe polish in his hair) who bumped him off, as befits this anagram of Vertigo—the switcheroo has the hitman gazing into a mirror while his victim's coffin is lowered into the ground. Téchiné's curious somnambulism suggests characters suspended between realities just as the country is suspended between subterranean political forces, moving as if underwater while a nightclub band plays "On Se Voit Se Voir." De Palma's Obsession is concurrent, and there's a pinch of Lynch in the joke about a man dying twice, on earth of hunger and in Heaven of indigestion. "Desire is a strange thing, no?" Despair and romanticism are the dueling poles, fused in a climax where confetti-strewn artifice is exalted by the craning camera as the rumbling of the approaching storm is heard. With Hélène Surgère, Julien Guiomar, and Claude Brasseur.
--- Fernando F. Croce |