L'Étrangleur (1972)
Directed by Paul Vecchiali

Film Review

Paul Vecchiali is probably the least likeliest director to leap aboard the psycho-thriller bandwagon that came rumbling into town in the late 1960s, early 1970s, having been set in motion by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), but then Vecchiali was never the most predictable of filmmakers and his first foray into genre territory is hardly the most conventional of genre films.  L'Étrangleur was the third full-length film that Vecchiali directed, although only the second to be released - after Les Ruses du diable (1966).  The negatives of his first feature, Les Petits drames (1961), were destroyed before prints could be made for commercial exploitation and the film is now sadly lost.

L'Étrangleur is among Paul Vecchiali's strangest and most ambiguous films, one that superficially adheres to the conventions of the classic psycho-thriller whilst simultaneously, and quite deliberately, subverting them.  The killer is certainly disturbing (Jacques Perrin combines innocence with a creepy aura of menace that is genuinely chilling) but he is far from being the sadistic maniac that we find in many similar films of this era.  In fact, instead of being an outright villain he turns out to be the noblest character in the film, one whose actions (whilst repugnant) are motivated by a desire to do good, to end the suffering of those whose lives have become a torment.  Émile's child-like purity sets him apart from the morally depraved world in which he exists, a world inhabited by treacherous and self-interested scum that seek to profit from his peculiar form of goodness, like vultures picking over the entrails of lion kill.

Every time that Émile kills it is as an act of supreme love.  There is scarcely a suggestion of the sexual connotations that we would expect in a conventional psycho-thriller, just a compassionate tenderness of the kind we might see in a parent caressing a child.  The sequence in which Émile  befriends and murders a faded actress (Hélène Surgère) has a poignancy that is genuinely heartrending, and far from shocking us the killing strikes us as the most merciful of accomplishments.  Recurrent flashbacks to the incident in Émile's childhood that made him a killer reinforce the impression that he is an innocent, whose murderous acts stem from a twisted notion of goodness that lies buried deep within his subconscious.  It is the most extreme and purest form of fetishism - Émile is gratified by killing because he is convinced that by doing so he is serving humanity, eradicating pain and distress and bringing relief to those for whom life no longer has any meaning.  If we were to judge Émile by the purity of his motives we could hardly fail to regard him as a saint.

By contrast, we have no difficulty whatsoever in placing the other two male protagonists in the drama at other end of the moral spectrum.  First there is the despicable cop Dangret (it is no accident that his name is an anagram of 'Dragnet'), a shifty manipulator who is prepared to do anything to see Émile brought to justice.  Unable or unwilling to achieve his ends by legitimate means, Dangret resigns as a police inspector and embarks on a personal contest against Émile, ultimately delivering a far more barbaric form of justice than even the modern French state would ever countenance (at the time the film was made, murder was still punishable by guillotine).  Dangret's grubby amorality sets him apart from both the weirdly saintly Émile and the thoroughly odious pilferer who empties the handbags of the strangler's victims, appropriately named the Jackal.  The fourth player in the drama, a casually slotted in femme fatale named Anna, is the most unfathomable - her motives are totally unclear and yet she plays a crucial role in Émile's redemption and ultimate martyrdom.

As you would expect from an auteur of Vecchiali's standing, L'Étrangleur transcends its borrowed genre trappings and emerges as a profound and desperately bleak commentary on the mores of its time.  It is a film that mockingly encapsulates pretty well everything that was wrong with the 1970s, in particular the exploitation phenomenon and public appetite for cheap lurid sensationalism, the most obvious signs of a wider decline in moral standards.  By casting a serial killer as compassionate angel of death, Vecchiali leaves us thinking that it is society as a whole that is mired in perversity and in danger of becoming addicted to the basest forms of gratification, not a few rogue individuals out on a killing spree.  L'Étrangleur is by far the most unsettling of Vecchiali's films, not because it resorts to tawdry thriller tactics but because of what it has to say about the time in which it was made, and by the end of it the stench of moral decay is overwhelming.  The more closely you examine the 1970s, the more sick you feel.

Film Synopsis

As a child, Émile is walking through the streets after dark when he encounters a stranger.  The latter takes his white woollen scarf and uses it to strangle an attractive young woman.  This incident has a profound effect on the young Émile, to the extent that when he is a grown man he re-enacts the same murder over and over again, choosing as his victims women who have grown tired of life.  Simon Dangret, the police inspector investigating the murders, poses as a journalist in the hope of luring the killer into a trap.  A young woman named Anna approaches Dangret and offers to help him by acting as bait, but he prefers to work alone.  Meanwhile, a thief named the Jackal has begun to profit from Emile's murders, helping himself to the possessions of the dead women after each killing.  When Émile and Dangret finally meet, the strangler insists that he is acting from pure motives and is not murdering the women for their jewels or money.  When he discovers that Dangret is a cop, Emile feels betrayed and realises he has a dangerous enemy.  Anna is about to become an unwitting pawn in their final encounter.  Having resigned from his position, Dangret brings Émile and the Jackal together, so that one will destroy the other...