Matialth
Good concept, poorly executed.
CommentsXp
Best movie ever!
Lollivan
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
billcr12
A doctor is sedating and then molesting his patients at a hospital where Bambi(Sophie Quinton) is a nurse in training. Doc is a guy with severe mental problems who is discovered by Bambi to be not living up to the Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm." Unfortunately, this film is much longer then necessary and for a far superior medical mystery I would recommend "Coma" from 1978. I was bored to death by the implausible storyline and disappointing ending.Ms. Quinton is a fine actress, well above the silly material here. Her best work is in "Poupoupidou" as a modern day Marilyn Monroe and a crime drama with a compelling script. Her talent and beauty are completely wasted in this tedious, overlong effort.
dbdumonteil
"Qui a tué Bambi?" has big qualities:gore and special effects are almost absent and the story is wrapped in an agonizing atmosphere .The director knows his classics: in turn ,I've thought of Henri-Georges Clouzot's "la Prisonnière" (the relationship between the doctor and the nurse which verges on sado-masochism) ,of Crichton' s "Coma" (there's an hospital where patients disappear,and one of their surgeons' behavior is dubious),of Polanski's "Rosemary's baby " (a character is in the middle of a strange conspiracy ,nobody believes her,but there's more: the jewel the doctor gives to the nurse strongly recalls the one Minnie Castevet gives to Rosemary;and in both movies the jewels had belonged to another woman (dead) before)and of "Carnival of souls" (the car wreck).The director adds hints at Walt Disney's "Bambi" as well;the title is no misnomer: "Your mother will not come round anymore" " Your legs are giving way under you,just like Bambi" .Perhaps the best ideas of the script are the "games" subject: an innocent game the nurses play in the corridor where they tell if a person is a man or a woman by the way they look at their fingernails; wicked games such as the consonants and the vowels one.You may remember in "the crying game" the story called "the scorpion and the frog" which comes back later at the end of that Jordan film . "The consonants and the vowels " game plays the same part here.It's downright disturbing when the nurse plays it for the first time in a hellish nightclub.The second time,not only the heroine but also the audience can play too.The two leads are convincing and they never overplay ,which is a tour de force in such a context.One can regret the last minute .It comes almost as an anticlimax.It's a good thriller.The director knows his classics.
jwarthen-1
A pretty dreadful French thriller in which a gifted scenarist may be learning how to direct. The 126 minutes' length hints of a genre-piece that can't stop itself: the director wrote twice as many fainting scenes, dream sequences, and face-offs between heroine-villain as any film could sustain, and then left in every damned one of them. Its only suspense lies in the gradually revealed nastiness of the director himself-- "He's not going to do THAT to his actors.... My God, he really IS." The casting and the peculiar violations of genre logic show vestiges of a much better movie than BAMBI. In a day full of interesting French films shown at Boston's MFA, this ringer, of course, turned out to be the only one secured for American distribution. You are seeing the Director's Cut on screen-- a case in which a Studio version of this frayed and rough-cut would be superior.
achilles2ca
I caught this film at the Toronto International Film Festival by accident - its yet another example of the rule that the best cinema you see is only seen when you least expect it.This is a witty, suspenseful, and very French film. It concentrates around the relationship between a student finishing up her nursing degree in a work term at the local hospital and her relationship with a young male doctor who she gradually suspects, over the course of the film, of being a psychopath. It is primarily a drama set within the plot of a thriller. There is a low-key romance that stutters but refuses to start between Isabelle (nick named, to her dislike as `Bambi' by Dr. Philipp) and the Dr. Philipp himself, the villain. All occurring while patients and staff slowly disappear, and things go increasingly wrong at the hospital.The lead actress (Sophie Quinton) is beautiful and plays her role excellently. Dr. Philipp is equally well played by Laurent Lucas as the cool doctor and the equally cool villain. He is suitably disconcerting and downright creepy when the situation calls for itMarchand also successfully creates a creepy and almost romantic atmosphere in the film despite the white corridors and the bland environment of the hospital grounds in which it is shot. The film constantly shifts from the fluorescent white of the interior of the hospital to the dark sky and dimmed green of the landscape of the outdoor night shots: he uses this `non-environment' to focus more greatly upon the characters. What remained with me after viewing this film were the images of the two leads' faces. Marchand uses a lot of close-ups, and as the film progresses, he increasingly concentrates upon the protagonists, allowing their expressions and moods to drive the suspense and the drama as much as the dialogue.Qui a tué Bambi is also a very witty film. It opens with a comic scene and is paced by well placed witty dialogue amongst the nurses and between Bambi and Dr. Philipp. Much of the pleasure in watching the film stems from it's dialogue as Marchand takes full advantage of his past experience as writer.The film's one failing is that it does not build up to it's climax well: there is not enough sense of mounting tension. As a drama is quite successful, as a Hitchcockian thriller it is not nearly so.This is one of those few films which one can enjoy watching simply for the pleasure of watching the craftsmanship of a skilled team of filmmakers as well as enjoying a well-told story.