"Loves Music, Loves to Dance. Husband Included." - Movie Review Essay: Deep Water (1981)

Loves Music, Loves to Dance. Husband Included.

By Jen Johans

Melanie (Isabelle Huppert) dances with her lover while her husband Vic (Jean-Louis Trintignant) plays chess. Vic eyes the moves she makes as he makes his own five feet away, playing visual chicken with her dance partner who's turned on as hell but doesn't know quite what to do when her husband's in the room. Where should he put his hands? His mouth? He tries using both at once and Vic doesn't flinch.

Vic knows his wife; he's the reason they're dancing, after all. Seeing her restless — sometimes going to change a record, or join another lover at the piano, or follow a third into the woods as if the handsome clarinetist were the Pied Piper — Vic knows he can't begin to keep up with the men, let alone compete with them sexually.

Sex isn't something Vic seems terribly interested in overall in Michel Deville's Deep Water . . . except when it comes to the Delilah to his Samson as Melanie's sexuality seems to fill him with as much disgust as the men hoping to bed his wife right before his eyes. Her naked body — even the sight of one breast exposed when her dress strap breaks — seems to incite obsessive repulsion as does the fact that she refuses to cover up to spite him. For Vic, it isn't misogyny but Melanie. He makes a tentative pass at the sweet wife of one of Melanie's lovers but does so halfheartedly. Facing internal defeat, Vic tells her that she's the type of woman he wants to love but it's no more than a passing thought. The man can't control his nature and love her or hate her (or more likely both), that nature is Melanie.

Raising his young daughter alongside Melanie in a French seaside town, their unusual marital arrangement to stave off divorce is a sudsy open secret. Yet while his wife flourishes in the company of so many adoring men — some of whom their young daughter likes better than others because they come bearing gifts — Trintignant's perfumer prefers to spend what little time he has away from his family with the pet snails that he keeps on their secluded property instead.

Vic observes the little creatures that most would turn into escargot with as much interest as he has watching Melanie and her men dance. Although initially we assume the attraction is because he feels like a sexually humiliated snail of a man, as the film continues, we wonder if his hobby has a different impetus altogether. Perhaps he admires the snails because — like the men who sneak off at parties to change into a bathing suit with his wife or drag their lips slowly down Melanie's neck even if he's nearby — Vic knows he could end their life at any time. In fact, he might have done so already, and not only to the snails. And that's the main thesis that initially piques out interest in Deville's 1981 slow burn psychosexual thriller, which was released in France as Eaux profondes.

Toying with one lover's nerves at a party by taking credit for an unsolved murder after the man thanks Vic for being cool with him dating his wife, we watch as Vic's chess skills spring to life and fear that (more?) violence will follow.

A stellar adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1957 eponymous novel from the country that seems to understand how to bring her tales of sexual obsession to life best, Trintignant's restrained yet dynamic portrayal of Vic is magnetic after the very first scene, and we watch him with Vic-like intensity.

Just like French filmmaker Jacques Demy's Model Shop plays particularly well with Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Deep Water feels like it would make a thrilling double feature with Stanley Kubrick's thematically similar tale of marital temptation and warfare, Eyes Wide Shut. Additionally, if you can find it, it's a great one to visit now before Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne releases his own adaptation of Highsmith's novel in 2020.

Bringing multilayered complexity to a role that, on paper, reads like a mere strumpet, the way that Isabelle Huppert uses silence and her eyes, combined with the length of time she takes to give someone her verbal or visual attention foreshadows the outstanding work she would do in this (and every) genre in the years to come. A tremendously talented actress perhaps best suited to the many shades of noir, if ever there was a woman born for Highsmith, it's Isabelle Huppert.

Testing the patience of some twenty-first century film fans, Deep Water waits quite awhile to let us in on the first plot twist and longer still before it eventually reveals its whole hand. And while I found myself wishing that Deville would've used even more of the running time to — in taking a cue from Huppert's performance — play up the duality of the proceedings, the '81 feature still works considerably well, nonetheless.

A largely forgotten French neo-noir with a potent antihero turn by Jean-Louis Trintignant, while the film belongs in the great pantheon of unhappily-ever-after movies, its tense, nasty, twisted little plot helps set it apart from the rest, even in scenes where it misses the mark. In the latter respect, it features a fascinating yet unfortunately largely unexplored angle wherein Melanie and Vic's daddy adoring daughter is not only not bothered by rumors that her father might be a killer but is actually proud of it . . . which thrilled and chilled this fan of the genre.

Yet despite a few stumbles, it's safe to say that you'll be easily seduced into dancing along with the film. Just be careful not to stand too close to the edge — or another man's wife — while he watches you squirm and plays chess.

(Availability Note: I recently caught this film on MUBI, where it played for thirty days before disappearing. If you'd like to check out MUBI so you can catch more films like Deep Water, click here to get 30 days free on me.)

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Blu-ray Review: The Great Silence (1968)

Now Available 

Giving new meaning to the phrase “close but no cigar,” word is that when Twentieth Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck reached the end of Sergio Corbucci's darkly subversive 1968 Spaghetti Western The Great Silence, he was rendered so speechless by the film's bleak ending that he swallowed the cigar he'd been smoking in absolute shock.

Unwilling to distribute the stark, anti-authoritarian picture in the United States (even after Corbucci was asked to shoot two new thankfully unused conclusions), Zanuck relegated Silence to a foreign release. And Corbucci's film did fairly well everywhere but its native Italy where – like Zanuck – one Sicilian viewer was so upset by the final showdown that he fired his gun in anger directly at the movie screen.

A revisionist take on the genre's classic Shane style paradigm wherein good triumphs over evil once a polite cowboy rides into town and sets things right, in Silence, A Man and a Woman actor Jean-Louis Trintignant saddles up for duty as the film's mute gunfighter-for-hire title lead.

Newly arrived in Snow Hill, Utah, Trintignant's Silence finds himself quickly caught up in a two-sided conflict. Turning the convention of "bad" outlaws and "good" bounty hunters on its head, in The Great Silence, the turf war is between a group of outlaws – many of whom committed petty crimes in order to give their loved ones something to eat – and the "bounty killers" who make a living getting away with murder plus a reward by gaming the system of killing in the name of (forced) self defense.

The brutality of the film's bounty killers led by Klaus Kinski's sadistic Loco (whose character was partly inspired by Boris Karloff's vampire in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath), as well as its message of political and judicial corruption are apparent right from the start of what Repo Man filmmaker and knowledgeable genre scholar Alex Cox has dubbed "the most pessimistic western of all time."

Reflecting the off-screen violence of 1968 – and the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X in particular – by subverting the genre that he treasured but had recently felt growing stale as a storyteller, Corbucci set out to make his own snowy homage to John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn and Andre DeToth's Day of the Outlaw.

Filmed in the Italian Dolomites as opposed to the traditional Spaghetti locale of Spain, Corbucci's opus opens with a sea of white as far as the eye can see. Augmented by twenty-six tons of shaving cream, the snowy visual scope not only matches Silence's melancholic tone but, contrasted by its dark sets and costumes, it punctuates the film's bursts of red blood and black gunfire that much more.

And similar to the way that a memorable match cut of a flame is employed to take us from the present to a flashback – from Ennio Morricone's simpler and relatively downbeat score to the brutal (and occasionally blurry) beauty of Silvano Ippoliti's cinematography – everything in Silence foreshadows the eventual literal and metaphorical darkness to come.

Worthy of endless analysis from political to religious to Freudian to moral, the revolutionary work makes brilliant use of a genre that lends itself so well to subtext.

Breaking new ground, although relatively chaste, Silence notably features Corbucci's one and only love scene. Serving as a powerful step in the right direction in terms of gender and racial equality, not only is the romantic moment initiated by its female lead (after she's given a firm no to someone else) but by featuring a white actor and black actress in the form of Trintignant and talented newcomer Vonetta McGee it's also interracial in nature. And although Corbucci had no interest in filming another, by using love instead of war, Silence's brief moment of tenderness might've broken down walls that violence wouldn't breach in movies to come.

For decades only a cult film here in the United States, now thanks to Film Movement, The Great Silence has at last been given a gorgeous 2k restoration and theatrical release in time for its fiftieth anniversary. As loaded with bonus features as Corbucci's film is with symbolism, the brand new Blu-ray and DVD editions of Silence boast a terrific essay from film critic Simon Abrams, the two unused alternate endings, a commentary featurette with Alex Cox, as well as the 1988 Spaghetti Western documentary Westerns, Italian Style and more, although the main draw remains the film itself.

Visually reminiscent of Robert Altman's own subversive 1971 western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Great Silence also served as a major influence on Quentin Tarantino's work. Yet despite the fact that Corbucci paid homage to multiple films in just as many genres, in terms of how to make a Spaghetti Western set in the late 1800s relevant to those in the late 1960s, in the end, Corbucci was far more inspired by events playing out in the news than he was by art.

A fascinating watch, now with the Trump Administration working to game the system, escape justice, and dial us back to Old West era laws, eerily some of the political arguments and warnings in Corbucci's classic have become timelier than ever. Just like the flame in the film that flicks us from present to past, The Great Silence shows us that although things have changed, when it comes to where we ultimately want to be as a country, we're still close but no cigar. Yet even though it holds up a startling mirror to society, maybe instead of feeling defeated by the ending, we can just worry about right now and keep fighting for what's right.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: Il Sorpasso (1962)

Now Available to Own
   
  

The title of film critic turned filmmaker Dino Risi’s bold 1962 consumerist commentary disguised as a road comedy Il Sorpasso translates in Italian to the dangerous driving maneuver called “the overtaking,” which references the country’s then-popular trend of taking over the position of the car ahead of you on the roadway by passing it at high speed.

Culturally limiting, in other countries the film was given more descriptive titles ranging from France’s The Braggart to The Easy Life in the United States where undoubtedly art-houses were still trying to cash in on the success of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

But when you consider how quickly Italian audiences were overtaken by the film – turning it into such a powerful word-of-mouth breakout hit that despite only selling fifty tickets on day one, two days later theater owners had to turn people away at the door – the decision to give Risi’s work such an offbeat yet nationally specific titles seems particularly fitting in retrospect.

Yet while viewers in his own country gravitated to it lira-over-fist, it took critics a full decade to appreciate Il Sorpasso for the groundbreaking cinematic touchstone that it was, which (much like the subtlety of the weight carried by the true meaning of the title) is part of its charming mystique.

Essentially only the second veritable Italian road picture after Rossellini’s 1954 Journey to Italy failed to find an audience, part of the reason Sorpasso worked so well was because the timing for a new kind of Rome, Open City was long overdue.

Having moved away from the gritty post-war neorealist tales of economic woe as well as the broad-edged energy of the commedia all-italiana school— Il Sorpasso was that tricky indefinable work that didn’t easily adhere to any of the trends in Italian filmmaking from the wandering camera and existential angst of Antonioni to Fellini’s Avante-garde tales about the rich and hedonistic.

As a former film critic well-versed in American cinema and with a particular fondness for the bittersweet dramedies of Billy Wilder as well as the teary laughter of Charlie Chaplin, Risi (who’d also previously studied psychiatry), had a very international humanistic outlook which shows throughout Sorpasso.

And given not only Risi’s similarities in background but also his decision to cast a French actor in a lead role (Jean-Louis Trintignant, filling in Jacques Perrin), I was surprised by how much the tone of this indisputably Italian film felt like a distant cousin to French New Wave critics turned filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut’s Breathless.

And perhaps paying indirect homage to Breathless as well as deriving influence from the melancholic undercurrent that’s always gone hand-in-hand with even the most manic of Italian comedies, Risi serves up Sorpasso with an audacious yet fitting finale (that likewise may have inspired Easy Rider in its own turn).

Even though Risi does poke fun at some of his contemporaries as Vittorio Gassman’s loudmouth Bruno states that Antonio’s L'Eclisse put him to sleep, the filmmaker also employs the same De Sica and Rosellini-esque Neorealist roots of layering his work with subtext (but with the lightest of touches).

While you can view this title about a middle-aged impulsive adventurer who forces a young studious stranger into going on a two-day trip around the Italian countryside as a character study rolled into a “journey” film of allegorical, metaphorical and literal meaning (not unlike Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise two decades later), Risi laces Sorpasso with a commentary about Italy’s new economic boom.

With more people than ever before able to indulge in the expenses of the sweet life, as the characters venture further outside of Rome a gentle culture clash ensues as they compare the city to the country, coming face-to-face with everything from a country dance to long-estranged family members who are making life decisions based on money.

From the question of just where and why they’re racing around with this need to flee and overtake (and from what) to an ahead of its time commentary about the alienation of people as Bruno laments that he’s never had a real friend, Il Sorpasso paints a thought-provoking picture of a specific time and place.

And by allowing his cinematographer and editor an unusual amount of generosity to show us the lives of extras and the goings-on of people and cars at the edges of the frame, Sorpasso’s exploration of the evolving attitudes not represented by our male leads help add extra warmth and humor to the what might have been a much too somber canvas.

Gorgeously restored by The Criterion Collection for this dual format Blu-ray/DVD three-disc combo pack release complete with an intriguing introduction by Sideways helmer Alexander Payne that opens your eyes to new details, vintage clips and interviews such as a fascinating French television segment with Trintignant that takes you behind-the-scenes of the personalities behind the film, Il Sorpasso also boasts another collectible essay filled booklet.

Technically speaking, of course, the flawless transfer of Alfio Contini's black and white cinematography evidenced in the feature presentation is the real star. However, the booklet, which features an in-depth analysis of the film as well as a scholarly study of Italian cinema in its Golden Era from 1960-1963 is sure to send you looking for more Criterions to explore in the hopes that you’ll find yourself as overtaken with delight as you are when you buckle up for Risi’s classic.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.