Mortelle randonnée (1983)
Directed by Claude Miller

Film Review

With its eerily dreamlike trappings and slightly sickening forays into black comedy, Mortelle Randonnée stands out as one of Claude Miller's more intimate and disturbing films.  It offers a memorably unique cinematic experience, plunging us into the crepuscular world of its two lead protagonists - a lone detective and the killer he is relentlessly stalking.  We ought to be shocked, or at least perturbed, by what we see, but instead we are moved, compelled to see the characters' obvious derangement from a sympathetic angle.

As it undulates in and out of farce, the noirish plot taking ever more bizarre swerves towards the grimly surreal, the film becomes ever more compelling and unsettling, and we cannot help feeling willingly complicit in the crimes that flash before our eyes as we anticipate the shocking climax that must surely come. The tongue-in-cheek script reflects the contrasting personalities of its two writers - the father and son team Michel and Jacques Audiard.  Michel Audiard was best known for his mischievously parodic comedies, such as Les Tontons flingueurs (1963); his son Jacques would later win acclaim as a director for his own distinctive brand of noir thriller - De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté (2005), Un prophète (2009).  Mortelle Randonnée was based on a novel by Marc Behm, which was later adapted as Eye of the Beholder (1999) by Stephan Elliott, with Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd in the principal roles.

Both stylistically and tonally, Mortelle Randonnée is a film unlike any other that Miller made.  The one closest to it is the director's earlier psychological thriller, Dites-lui que je l'aime (1977), adapted from Patricia Highsmith's novel This Sweet Sickness.  This film had been ill-received by the critics and was a massive flop, very nearly derailing Miller's filmmaking career, until he bounced back with Garde à vue (1981), a gripping police drama that paired two immense talents, Lino Ventura and Michel Serrault.

Serrault was an obvious choice for the role of Beauvoir in  his second Miller collaboration.  With his implacable features and a persona that cannot help suggesting a dangerously psychotic nature, he was well suited to playing disturbed characters of this kind.  In his personal life, Serrault was profoundly marked by the loss of his eldest daughter Caroline, who died in a car accident at the age of 19 in 1977.  Maybe this was what led Miller to cast him as Beauvoir, a man who was equally traumatised by the absence of his daughter.  In any event, the part was a gift for Serrault, allowing him to turn in a performance that, whilst unutterably creepy, is easily among his most authentic and sympathetic.

Equally adept at playing unbalanced individuals with complex underpinnings is Isabelle Adjani,  From Truffaut's L'Histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) to Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1988), Adjani showed a virtually unrivalled flair for portraying vulnerable characters being inwardly warped by destructive passions.  Mortelle Randonnée allowed her to develop this tenebrous repertory even further, pushing it into new territory where tragedy and comedy become the most intimate of bed-fellows.

Like her co-star, Adjani compels us to see through her erratic, murderous act of rebellion and fasten on the tragic soul beneath, the abandoned child desperately pining for parental acceptance.  The close bond that develops between Adjani and Serrault in the course of this extraordinary film is intensely worrying at first, but it acquires a blisteringly obvious logic once we understand that their manic quests have a common aim - the union of father and daughter.

Film Synopsis

Haunted by a past that he does his best to bury, fifty-something Louis Beauvoir leads a solitary life in which there is no place for sentiment or intimate human contact.  Working for a private detective agency, he has a reputation for dogged efficiency and has acquired the soubriquet The Eye in underworld circles.  Years ago, Beauvoir was a very different man.  He had a family and was devoted to his little girl Marie.  But when his wife walked out on him, taking their daughter with her, his whole life collapsed.  All that remains of those days is a fading photograph of his darling Marie.

Now Beauvoir immerses himself in his work.  He is presently on the trail of a serial killer, Catherine Leiris, a woman in her twenties who preys on wealthy men before slaughtering them for her own amusement.  In the course of his investigation, Beauvoir develops a strange fascination for Catherine and sees in her something of a kindred spirit.  She arouses the paternal instinct in him, becomes a substitute for the daughter he has lost.  Instead of bringing her to justice, the world-weary detective does everything within his power to protect her as he follows her around Europe.

Catherine's insane trajectory finally leads her to a blind architect, Ralph, with whom she discovers true love for the first time in her life.  Beauvoir cannot bear to see another man monopolise Catherine's attentions in this way, and in a fit of jealousy he brings about Ralph's death.  Catherine resumes her murderous itinerary and teams up with a young crook named Betty.  Unable to relinquish the dark obsession that has taken him over, Beauvoir continues shadowing the woman whose tragic destiny is so closely linked to his own...