Fever (2015)
Directed by Raphaël Neal

Film Review

Photographer and occasional actor Raphaël Neal makes a promising directing debut with this idiosyncratic crime drama loosely based on a novel of the same title by Leslie Kaplan.  The 'Crime and Punishent' conceit that kicks off the narrative quickly develops into something of much wider social significance as Fever forces us to contemplate humanity's innate disposition to evil, freely referencing Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as it does so.  It's clearly a more cerebral kind of crime drama than your average mainstream cinema audience would be prepared to sit through but in spite of its somewhat heavy-going philosophising Neal's first feature is a strangely compelling work.  Helped by an ethereal score supplied by the pop singer Camille, Fever draws you in with its creepy atmosphere and contemplative study on the nature of guilt and evil.

If the plot sounds familiar that is probably because it has considerable common ground with Hitchcock's film Rope (1948), adapted from a play by Patrick Hamilton which was in turn based on the true story of two philosophy students -  Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb - who cold-bloodedly executed a fourteen-year-old boy in 1920s Chicago.  In a similar vein, Neal's film revolves around two students who believe they can commit a guilt-free murder, but rather than being driven to the hangman's noose by an unsympathetic James Stewart they become an object of fascination for a totally mixed-up bystander, in the form of Julie-Marie Parementier.  The latter's crisis of identity results in all three characters being forced into confronting some dark truths about themselves and human nature in general, leading inevitably to a bleak contemplation of the Holocaust and the banality of evil

Stimulating though it is, Fever suffers from the classic problem that all films tackling meaty subjects are prone to, which is that it has insufficient space and time to cover the ground it clearly wants to.  If this were a novel, Raphaël Neal would have had the freedom to develop his ideas more fully and arrive at some satisfying conclusion, but the constraints of the feature film force him to skate on the surface and merely hint at the profound depths he is dying to plunge himself and his audience into.  A lot of ground is covered but too much is left unsaid, so whilst the film pricks the conscience and fires the imagination, it leaves us struggling to fill in the gaps and work out what exactly its author is trying to say.

For a first film, Fever has much going for it - first and foremost some slick and imaginative direction which effectively conceals the fact that the film was made on a shoestring.  As the two Nietzschen leads Martin Loizillon and Pierre Mourre are eerily compelling, both actors bringing a sinister yet tender edge to their on-screen rapport which carries more than a hint of homoeroticism (one of several allusions to Hitchcock's film).  No less fascinating is Julie-Marie Parementier's Zoé, the third character in a perverse triangle, one that is presumably intended to symbolise that dark part of each one of us which draws us to evil like moth to a flame.  Enigmatic performances and some canny mise-en-scène by a first-time director with great promise redeem a film that risks being smothered by its intellectual pretensions.  Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Arendt - it's quite a lot to take in, but mercifully Neal sticks to the edited highlights.

Film Synopsis

Damien and Pierre, two gifted high school students living in Paris, wonder if it is possible to feel guilt if you commit a random killing.  Just a few weeks before their end of school exams, they test their ideas by murdering a woman they just happen to come across in the street.  It might have been the perfect crime, had it not been for the fact that a young woman named Zoé caught sight of them on leaving the apartment block where the murder was committed.  Zoé's interest in the crime soon develops into a full-blown obsession just as Damien and Pierre begin to take in the enormity of the act they have committed...