One Deadly Summer - 1983 film review

Four years ago I extolled Sebastien Japrisot's novel One Deadly Summer on this blog, mentioning the film version, which dates from 1983 and benefits from a script co-written by Japrisot, along with the director Jean Becker. The film was a huge hit in France in its day and I've finally caught up with a sub-titled version.

The film came out a couple of years after Lawrence Kasdan's brilliant updating of the film noir, Body Heat and this movie has been called an example of "pastoral noir". Certainly, the French countryside, lovingly presented, is bathed in sunshine, but after a while the darkness of the story and the central character's motivations begins to dominate.

The book is subtly written and can't have been easy to film, but Japrisot's involvement means that the movie is a good one. It also has one massive plus, the casting of Isabelle Adjani as Eliane, or Elle, the young woman who seduces the amiable but naive fireman Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon). She's as much a femme fatale as the women in Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, but her motivations are subtle and the demons that possess her are, for a long time, difficult to identify.

Adjani captures Elle's beauty and wilfulness, as well as the complexity of her nature. I imagine that the nude scenes in which she appears did no harm to the film's viewing figures and I do wonder if the movie would be shot in quite the same way today. On the whole, though, the sexual content is appropriate to the storyline. It's a long film, and at times I felt it moved too slowly. But the power of the story is such that it's definitely worth waiting for the calamitous events to unfold, leading to a shocking finale. It's a very different film from Body Heat, but quite compelling.

Forgotten Book - One Deadly Summer

I've mentioned before my admiration for Sebastien Japrisot (1931-2003), a renowned film-maker who is one of my favourite European crime writers. He conjures up plots as tricky as those of Arley and Boileau-Narcejac, but the stand-out feature of his work is the hypnotic quality of his writing. These attributes are evident in One Deadly Summer (1977), well translated by Alan Sheridan, which was adapted into a successful film starring Isabelle Adjani, which - as yet - I haven't seen.

This is a story with multiple narrators, and Japrisot uses the device cleverly to reveal layer after layer of his psychological melodrama. We start with "Ping Pong", a naive but rather likeable man who is a mechanic and volunteer fireman with a crush on a beautiful but mysterious nineteen year old girl, Eliane, often known as Elle. When Elle sets out to seduce him, we realise that she has an ulterior motive. But what exactly does she have in mind?

From an early point, it becomes evident that this is a story about revenge for an incident that occurred twenty years earlier, but what exactly happened, and who was involved is not quite so clear. Elle is as charismatic as she is scheming, and as she insinuates her way into Ping Pong's family life, we know that something terrible is destined to happen. Japrisot makes the reader desperate to find out exactly what fate has store for his characters.

You'll have gathered that I really admired this book. Japrisot was hugely successful in France, but has never been as well known in Britain, though I came to his work because it was mentioned by Julian Symons in Bloody Murder, such a great source of information back in the 70s. I am, though, much more of a fan of Japrisot than was Symons. It's a real shame that he didn't write more novels; I haven't read a book of his that I didn't enjoy.