Deadly hike : Michel Serrault protector of Isabelle Adjani
After proposing the excellent detective film Prison (1981), remarkable behind closed doors and awarded four Césars, discovered Claude Miller Michel Serrault for the thriller Deadly hike (1983). This time the plaintiff is not the defendant, but the person conducting the investigation. In the film he plays Beauvoir, known as “the Eye”, a private investigator characterized by the loss of her daughter Marie. A new mission leads him to have to follow Catherine Leiris (Isabelle Adjani), the girlfriend of Paul Hugo, heir to a rich family. This seems trivial. Until the moment she sees Catherine get rid of Paul’s body. After that, the young she leaves and goes to change her appearance and identity.
Rather than report her, Beauvoir decides to continue following her. Unseen, he watches as he continues to rob rich men before shooting him to death. But the private investigator will go even further, disposing of one of the bodies himself to ensure that Catherine is not captured. He becomes like this his protector and his accomplice without her knowing.
Let’s find it inside Deadly hike a solid cast, including supporting roles, with the participation of Guy Marchand, Stéphane Audran, Sami Frey, Dominique Frot and Jean-Claude Brialy. But above all it is this duo formed by Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani that leaves a lasting impression. He through the deep emotion that hides a silent face behind her, and she through her charisma and her magnificent gaze. Two years earlier, she had delivered one of acting’s greatest performances Possession (nineteen eighty-one). And the same year as Deadly hikeshe was awarded a César for the second time The deadly summer (1983).
The failure of Claude Miller’s thriller
Deadly hike it had everything to be a new success for Claude Miller. The director’s dark atmosphere and a dream cast, combined with a screenplay by Michel Audiard and his son Jacques Audiard (their first collaboration). Without forgetting a more than comfortable budget, logically attributed to the filmmaker later Be careful visualization. Unfortunately, upon its release, the film was a failure. It doesn’t accumulate in the rooms that 916,868 entriesa far cry from the 2 million entries of Prison.
For its part, the press was not very encouraging. Like the reminder Telerama in an article dedicated to the film, the magazine The cinema notebooks I saw it “in Miller’s staging, glacial, poisonous, very Hitchcockian, à la Vertigo, an advertising aesthetic“. It was only later Deadly hike was rehabilitated.
Today everyone agrees: Mortelle Randonnée is a black diamond, undoubtedly the most stylized, most beautiful, most literary, most desperate French thriller of all Michel Audiard’s screenplays.
A great film about pain
Indeed, the desperate nature of Deadly hike is perhaps the most interesting element of the film. Because if Beauvoir’s attitude of wanting to protect Catherine at first seems to make no sense, the revelations that follow give a coherent explanation and above all make Beauvoir a terribly tragic character. Claude Miller’s feature film actually is a film about pain. All the more touching if we know that a few years earlier, Caroline (1958-1977), Michel Serrault’s daughter, lost his life at the age of 19 in a car accident. “But no one will ever speak openly about this topic during the filming of the film…“accurate Telerama.
Finally, the last scene of Deadly hikewhich sees the detective chasing Catherine, chased by the police and leaning towards suicide by car one of the most moving sequences. In a final cry of anguish, Beauvoir calls the young woman “Marie”, as his daughter, and thus definitively immerses the viewer in a feeling of extraordinary desperation.
Source: Cine Serie
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