Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

morrison-dylan-fan Looking at my April viewings,the most unexpected quality viewing I've had is François Truffaut's 1975 Costume Drama The Story of Adele H,largely due to the performance from Isabelle Adjani. Since seeing him charge the Neo-Noir atmosphere up with 1981's Garde à vue,I've been keeping a look out for more creations by Claude Miller. Checking Adjani's credits,I was thrilled to find that she had worked with Miller on a Neo-Noir that has recently turned up uncut with Subs, (the cut DVD came out after US remake Eye of the Beholder)which led to me breaking the circuit.View on the film:Following up Garde à vue by cameraman Gilbert Duhalde becoming the cinematographer here, directing auteur Claude Miller beautifully expands on the recurring motifs of Garde with lush outdoor watercolours, and a haunting Jazz score from Carla Bley. Making the 2 hour run-time move at an incredible speed, Miller gives "The Eye" tracking Marie a pristine Neo-Noir clarity of tracking shots following The Eye's attempts to blend in with the crowd. Bending the initial investigation to the Eye's growing obsession,Miller twists it into an ultra-stylised dream-logic world,where Marie's killings have the metallic shine of Giallo, a telekinetic-like connection made with smoothly-held tracking shots,and an explosive shattering of the connection between The Eye and Marie.Spreading limited details of Marie's life across the screen in photos, Michel & Jacques Audiard's adaptation of Marc Behm's book brims with a Neo-Noir attention to detail,where The Eye excitingly takes the smallest clue to make the fullest portrait of Marie. Turning the mystery down to a simmering threat, the writers masterfully piece together The Eye's years following of Marie into a study of obsession, where the anticipation of speaking to her gets The Eye to start imagining/performing what he dreams their first encounter will be.Lighting the eyes of The Eye from every sighting, Isabelle Adjani gives a magnificent performance as Marie, whose mysterious murmurs on her life pulls everyone from Stéphane Audran's " The grey lady" to Sami Frey's Ralph Forbes towards this Femme Fatale's blast of silence. Reuniting with Miller after Garde,Michel Serrault gives a thrilling performance as Neo-Noir loner The Eye,with Serrault and Adjani impressively creating chemistry just from glances at each other. Desiring to learn all about Marie,Serrault strips The Eye's life to a raw obsession,which cracks as the deadly circuit breaks.

writers_reign There is, alas, only one Prevert and if only Audiard realized and accepted that he may have abandoned his attempts to eclipse Prevert as a master of word-play and been content to try and equal him though even that was never going to happen. Claude Miller is definitely quirky and probably wouldn't know how to go about shooting an 'ordinary' film and as a result he either misses by a mile or hits one out of the park. This is one of his most surreal efforts but also one of his best but it helps if you are prepared to accept wackiness as Art form. A private investigator, Serrault, barely going through the motions of living since he allowed a personal tragedy - his wife walked out on him taking the daughter he never really knew and the daughter subsequently died aged seven - to color everything that came after, is assigned a fairly routine case to discredit what is assumed to be the gold-digging fiancé of a wealthy young man; instead he finds she is a serial killer and allows himself to fantasise that she is his lost daughter miraculously restored to life and is happy to watch passively as she moves from country to country leaving a string of dead man - plus one lesbian lover - in her wake; he is also not above covering her tracks. In terms of realism it makes Lord Of The Rings look like a documentary but it is also compelling. If you like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing you'll like.

robert-temple-1 Although the DVD version of this which I saw recently had 24 minutes cut out of it, this film even in its truncated form still stands as a masterly work. Director Claude Miller (the French say 'Millaire') is a Grand Old Man of the French cinema, and this is one of his early films, when he was already making masterpieces. Two years later he made the unforgettable IMPUDENT GIRL with the teenaged Charlotte Gainsbourg. More recently, he has made the equally unforgettable UN SECRET (2007, see my review). Any Miller film is always going to be interesting, gripping, and disturbing, and this one is all of that and more. It is based on a novel by the American writer who settled in France, Marc Behm. The leading character is a real Mr. Anonymous, a loser detective played brilliantly by Michel Serrault, who is so ordinary-looking that nobody ever notices him. As he himself says in the film: 'I look like everybody.' His life was shattered twenty years earlier when his little girl died. His wife had left him four years before, taking the child away. He is haunted and obsessed by this double loss of the desertion and later the death of the child he was never even allowed to know, and his current life is entirely empty. When given a routine assignment to try to identify the girlfriend of a rich young man, when he encounters the girl, played with haunted intensity by Isabelle Adjani, something clicks. For much of the film we are led to believe that he thinks that she is his lost daughter, and only much later do we realize that he is merely pursuing her as a fantasy substitute, because he knows very well that his real daughter died as a child. When he realizes that Adjani is living on the edge of desperation just as he is, he feels a spiritual kinship with her. Very soon he realizes that she is a psychotic murderess, and has countless aliases. She compulsively kills and robs, barely stopping long enough to catch her breath between victims. Serrault follows her from country to country, watches her trysts through windows, even witnesses her disposing of a body, slitting a throat, and being a very bad girl indeed. But he feels compelled to protect her, because he knows that she is living as much in a mad fantasy as he himself is. He becomes emotionally and psychologically complicit in her crimes, and even disposes of one of the bodies for her. But he does not speak to her and she never notices him because he is such a nonentity. This is a strange tale of affiliation by osmosis, where two people who do not communicate nevertheless come to live a symbiotic existence, one oblivious and the other passionately devoted, as they travel continuously together from crime scene to crime scene. The film is immensely sad, not only as regards Serrault and the tragic hole in his existence, his personal néant ('nothingness'), but also the demented round of murder pursued by the girl, who is powerless to stop herself, who is in the grip of a compulsion which is equally a 'nothingness'. We must assume that Marc Behm came under the influence of Sartre and the existentialists, as all this 'nothingness' was what they all wrote about the whole time. The existentialists were always such a pain that I am delighted that they have all sunk without trace and no one even gives them a thought today: celebrities one day, and forgotten the next. But whereas there is nothing sad about their fate, there is genuine tragedy about the characters in this film, including some of the minor ones, such as the blackmailer's jilted girlfriend, a poignant portrait of despair which is heartbreaking. Yes, this is a film about people at the very edge of desperation, and we must never be contemptuous of people who are driven so far that in their wild frenzy they become capable of anything. It is very much a tribute to the sensitivity of Claude Miller that we are able to feel sympathy even for the tormented Adjani character. That is the sign of a real film-maker.

Kurt Thomas One of the best movies ever. Very dark, very deadpan, perfect acting. Great script, too.The La Paloma version in the blind man's villa is by Hans Albers.