Diabolically Yours (1967)

Original title: Diaboliquement vôtre

A man (Alain Delon) wakes up after a car accident with only little to none memory of who or what he is. There’s a woman our guy is pretty sure he doesn’t know named Christiane (Senta Berger) who says she is his wife, and that his name is Georges Campos. Georges (as I’ll call him to make things easier) isn’t quite sure about any of this, but since it is 1967, and this is Senta Berger who’s making eyes at him, he’s not really motivated to disagree too hard.

When Christiane takes Georges home, he learns he is supposed to be stinking rich as well as excellently married. Apparently, he, Christiane, his best bud Freddie (Sergio Fantoni) – who also happens to be a doctor – and their servant Kim (Peter Mosbacher doing some pretty embarrassing yellowface) have just returned from seven years of successful business in Hong Kong (as far as I remember my colonial lore, the place colonialist screw-ups go to make it) to settle down in a rich person’s mansion in the country. Georges doesn’t seem to really buy any of this, but is totally going to go with it for most of the rest of the film, though he does tend to waver and whine quite a bit.

There are some pretty screwy things going on around him. There’s the little fact that Christiane and Freddie hold him in the house like a virtual prisoner despite only very minor physical injuries, the mysterious medication he is supposed to take every evening, the voice in the night that tells him details about his life and occasionally suggests he kill himself, the various accidents that very well could kill him. Georges’s own dog would rather kill him than recognize him, as well, and Christiane, while going through an extensive “loving wife” routine won’t even kiss him, and certainly isn’t going to have sex with him, however much he tries to wheedle himself into her panties. The last thing seems to be foremost in our protagonist’s mind; and he doesn’t even know about the dom/sub thing Christiane and Kim have going.

I’m generally not terribly fond of the long-running “people fuck around with an amnesiac’s mind” sub-genre of the thriller. It’s so well-worn, the twists tend to be particularly obviously and seldom terribly interesting, and the plans of the film’s antagonists tend to the ludicrously contrived. As they are here.

Julien Duvivier – while certainly perfectly able to shoot a lot of candy-coloured interiors and make them look really good – in his final stint behind the camera isn’t really the kind of director to distract from these flaws very well. Duvivier does tend to the plushy and the stiff – a handful of smash-cuts really don’t change much about it – and does love to make an already draggy and talky script feel even longer. Of course, part of the problem is that there’s so little material for him to work with here. There’s plot and incident for about half the film’s running time, and the writers seem so hard-pressed to come up with anything that’ll actually lead to suspenseful sequences, they tend to repeat everything they do come up with two or three times.

It’s all very obvious, as well – there’s really never any doubt that Delon’s character is not actually Georges, and that the rest of the household is conspiring to trap and kill him, but are very bad indeed at it. The best they can come up with is making our protagonist extremely horny, which doesn’t sell terribly well anymore today once it gets into the realm of sexual violence, either.

As if it weren’t already difficult to sympathize with a guy who is as much of a racist prick as he is.

In a different movie, I’d probably commend Diabolically’s dark and cynical ending, but in the context of all the treading of water the film gets up to before it, it simply hasn’t worked at all to earn this particular ending.