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.

Three Films Make A Post: Blood-curdling giant fly creature runs amuck!!!

Le Saut de l’ange (1971): This is a grim, rather cynical revenge movie by Yves Boisset about a bloody election in Marseille, or rather Jean Yanne coming back from a self-imposed Thai exile to take revenge for his wife and kid who are (quite uselessly) killed for reasons of politics and money he doesn’t actually have anything to do with anymore. In Boisset’s hands, it is a somewhat dry, deliberately paced crime movie with jabs of intense, sharp violence, a basic feeling of hopelessness, and a sense of barely repressed political anger. It is, as they say, quite a good film if you like that sort of thing, which I do, particularly when it includes the handful of moments of brilliant filmmaking this one does, moments when the film stops being dry completely and somehow turns its quite down-to-earth idea of how horrible violence works mythical without actually changing its posture at all. Call it alchemy.

Because Boisset is a director of taste, the film also features fan (that would be me) favourites Gordon Mitchell, Senta Berger and Sterling Hayden.

Espion, lève-toi (1982): Speaking of Yves Boisset, there’s also this spy movie with Lino Ventura as a French sleeper agent situated in Switzerland who finds himself reactivated only to stumble through a business so labyrinthine, he doesn’t even know if the people who tell him he’s working for them are actually who they say they are. On the pacing level, this is also rather slow, but it is again a sure-handed slowness the film needs to get to breathe. It’s less overtly violent than the older movie but that’s because it is really much more useful for the film’s goal of having its audience share its protagonist’s feeling of alienation and confusion to keep the violence off-screen and ambiguous.

If you’re the type to enjoy films that are structured like a peculiarly nasty kind of chess – abstract until they become all too personal – like I sometimes do, this is a pretty perfect example of it. Parts of the film are really about what very abstract strategic goals do to the people who are part of the strategy, the moment when the blind and indifferent forces of politics turn against you, or rather, use your personal loyalties, your humanity, to make you their chess piece until its time for you to disappear forever.

Breakout (1975): If there’s a place in your heart for middling 70s action movies, that’s where Tom Gries’s film probably lives. It’s not a bad film at all, but one that doesn’t make enough use of a great cast (Charles Bronson! Robert Duvall! Randy Quaid! Jill Ireland!), and could do quite a bit more with the basic set-up of a charming rogue (surprisingly enough Bronson) trying to get an innocent rich American (Duvall) out of jail because he’s rather fond of the rich man’s wife (Ireland). And money. I know, it’s “based on a true story” but when has that ever stopped a movie from changing the truth into something more entertaining?

Despite its lack of depth, it’s still a fun enough film, if only because it provides an opportunity to witness Bronson smile and emote and wisecrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,action,thriller,spies,yves boisset,jean yanne,gordon mitchell,senta berger,sterling hayden,lino ventura,charles bronson,robert duvall,jill ireland,randy quaid

In short: The Quiller Memorandum (1966)

This semi-realist spy movie about secret agent Quiller (George Segal) trying to find a post-war Nazi base while the Nazis are trying to find the base of the British secret service at work in Berlin suffers from a bizarrely week script by dramatist Harold Pinter where the supposedly highly successful agent Quiller acts like an incompetent tool all of the time. Barely ten minutes into the movie, our supposed hero is falling deeply in love with a highly suspicious school teacher after having known her for about ten seconds (alright, she's played by late 60s Senta Berger, so there is something of an excuse for that).

Quiller walks through the film like a fool, never doing anything that makes him look like a professional, or at least like someone who vaguely knows what he's doing - his plan for finding the Nazis is after all to wander around, ask questions, look suspicious and permanently whine to his superiors for no reason the film ever makes its viewers privy to (usually it's a class thing in British cinema, but this is not a film fond of actually developing anything). Of course, if anyone in the film would not act like a total idiot (don't get me started on the Nazi plan to get Quiller to give them the information they want), Pinter's plot would break down at the first sign of competence.

The wasted actors (there are Alec Guinness playing a higher up in the British secret service hierarchy, and Max von Sydow as the Nazi boss) do their best with their pancake-flat roles, while director Michael Anderson manages to improve things with a lot of excellently moody shots of the non-tourist parts of Berlin. If you're able to not think about the script's basic lack of believability (I'm sure somebody is going to tell me Pinter meant the whole thing metaphorical and just ignored that he also needed to construct a world and characters an audience can believe in because that would have disturbed his precious metaphorical level), there are also some rather tense suspense scenes late in the film that would have been even more excellent if their basic set-ups (again) would not ask for ignoring a bit too much of their logical weakness.

These plot holes (I can't believe this film makes me of all people complain about plot holes) would not be much of a problem if the film itself wouldn't go for a semi-realist mood. Silly nonsense works well enough in a Eurospy film that wants to be pulpy fun and out-Bond Bondian silliness, but if you're going for a mood that's much less larger than life, you need to keep that mood consistently, something Anderson and Pinter fail to achieve.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,american movies,in short,george segal,alec guinness,max von sydow,senta berger,spies