CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Nonureva Really Surprised!

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

robert-temple-1 Although the DVD version of this which I saw recently had 24 minutes cut out of it, this film even in its truncated form still stands as a masterly work. Director Claude Miller (the French say 'Millaire') is a Grand Old Man of the French cinema, and this is one of his early films, when he was already making masterpieces. Two years later he made the unforgettable IMPUDENT GIRL with the teenaged Charlotte Gainsbourg. More recently, he has made the equally unforgettable UN SECRET (2007, see my review). Any Miller film is always going to be interesting, gripping, and disturbing, and this one is all of that and more. It is based on a novel by the American writer who settled in France, Marc Behm. The leading character is a real Mr. Anonymous, a loser detective played brilliantly by Michel Serrault, who is so ordinary-looking that nobody ever notices him. As he himself says in the film: 'I look like everybody.' His life was shattered twenty years earlier when his little girl died. His wife had left him four years before, taking the child away. He is haunted and obsessed by this double loss of the desertion and later the death of the child he was never even allowed to know, and his current life is entirely empty. When given a routine assignment to try to identify the girlfriend of a rich young man, when he encounters the girl, played with haunted intensity by Isabelle Adjani, something clicks. For much of the film we are led to believe that he thinks that she is his lost daughter, and only much later do we realize that he is merely pursuing her as a fantasy substitute, because he knows very well that his real daughter died as a child. When he realizes that Adjani is living on the edge of desperation just as he is, he feels a spiritual kinship with her. Very soon he realizes that she is a psychotic murderess, and has countless aliases. She compulsively kills and robs, barely stopping long enough to catch her breath between victims. Serrault follows her from country to country, watches her trysts through windows, even witnesses her disposing of a body, slitting a throat, and being a very bad girl indeed. But he feels compelled to protect her, because he knows that she is living as much in a mad fantasy as he himself is. He becomes emotionally and psychologically complicit in her crimes, and even disposes of one of the bodies for her. But he does not speak to her and she never notices him because he is such a nonentity. This is a strange tale of affiliation by osmosis, where two people who do not communicate nevertheless come to live a symbiotic existence, one oblivious and the other passionately devoted, as they travel continuously together from crime scene to crime scene. The film is immensely sad, not only as regards Serrault and the tragic hole in his existence, his personal néant ('nothingness'), but also the demented round of murder pursued by the girl, who is powerless to stop herself, who is in the grip of a compulsion which is equally a 'nothingness'. We must assume that Marc Behm came under the influence of Sartre and the existentialists, as all this 'nothingness' was what they all wrote about the whole time. The existentialists were always such a pain that I am delighted that they have all sunk without trace and no one even gives them a thought today: celebrities one day, and forgotten the next. But whereas there is nothing sad about their fate, there is genuine tragedy about the characters in this film, including some of the minor ones, such as the blackmailer's jilted girlfriend, a poignant portrait of despair which is heartbreaking. Yes, this is a film about people at the very edge of desperation, and we must never be contemptuous of people who are driven so far that in their wild frenzy they become capable of anything. It is very much a tribute to the sensitivity of Claude Miller that we are able to feel sympathy even for the tormented Adjani character. That is the sign of a real film-maker.

Pasky ...and still does now that I am 42. Serrault and Adjani (an improbable 'incestuous couple' at a first glance, but actually a dreamy duo which really works) are just great. They both look like zombies: two people who died a long time ago and who consider life as a sort of waiting room. They only want to step back into the black&white school photo, when everything was still OK and life worth living. The story verges on the side of madness from the beginning, with Mrs Schmidt-Boulanger (manager of detective agency - beautiful cameo for Geneviève Page, who was the Madam in Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour'). While she's explaining the case to Beauvoir (the detective), he watches dreamily a homeless smashing a window of Schmidt-Boulanger's car, stealing her fur coat and putting it on, parading around on the parking lot, like a model on the catwalk. And the music! Another improbable couple: Carla Bley and Schubert! And the dialogs! Michel and Jacques Audiard wrote one little gem after another. And the black humor! Just sit back, don't expect any believable plot, and ENJOY this little gem from the 80's!

tinome Mortelle Randonnée is arguably one of France's best noir ever. And one of Isabelle Adjani's brightest hour. You unfortunately have to understand french to fully appreciate Michel Audiard's brilliant, darkly humorous dialogs (and especially Serreault's monologues). Claude Miller's direction is at once classy and precise (very similar to his work on L'Accompagnatrice), while Pierre Lhomme's cinematography is lush when needed, gritty when necessary (mainly during the last third). I read a few bad reviews here and there and I must add, and I know I'm not the first, that the States version, not only the recent DVD but also the TV version and the old VHS, well, has always been the truncated, 95 min. cut. Now, the movie showed everywhere else in the world runs 120 min. sharp. Think about it: it doesn't only mean that almost quarter of the movie is absent, it also means that the editing, fatally, is different, so is the rhythm, the feel, the movie altogether. I saw the DVD and frankly, while the transfer's OK, it doesn't make much of an impression, but then again, think that almost half an hour's gone. I never understood that thing with American distributors and foreign films, as if American moviegoers needed shorter, tighter movies so it won't be too much of a shock. That's ridiculous. Any moviegoer, American or whatever, that goes to the theater and buys a ticket for an Adjani/Serreault movie is obviously not looking for The Rock or Paul Walker. Well, that's what I think anyway. The rating, of course, applies to the official 120 min. version. If you have a chance to see it, don't miss it. A real gem.

Pierre Croteau Behind his front of overflowing bitterness and cynicism, private eye Louis Beauvoir (Serrault), nicknamed L'Oeil, is deeply missing of a child to protect and cheer, while he is tracking down a serial killer, Catherine Leiris (The iris)(Adjani).The followed young woman will be just half-real, she'll be rather like the private eye dreams her.Like a picture of innocence in his memory, she should stay untouched and untouchable, so he will involve himself in her flight. Through his eyes and ears, she is a mythomaniac orphan, she has misbehaved, she considers herself as garbage, but she wants fondness, getting a substitutive father's attention by murdering men and women who get too close to her.The dream can last as long as the soliloquizing self-designated father can stay in tune with his substitute daughter, despite awakening bodies on their road, every bodies that did not have sleepwalker's stare and beat. We, as viewers, wish the great encounter and the forgiveness. We dream. We are willing to roam.A long time after we are supposed to be awake and down to earth, we are still humming the main musical theme, or La Paloma, or Schubert's lieder, who all played in the movie.Mortelle randonnée is an ambiguous and dark fairy tale for adults, sprinkled with bridges and winks. After many viewing, there is still to explore and enjoy in Mortelle randonnée, at least in the version I saw (118 min.).Mortelle randonnée is only a movie, not somebody. A movie does not think it is good. Only people can think Mortelle randonnée is good, or think it is not. It is a matter of taste. Critics who attribute thoughts or claims to movies, instead of ascribing them to film-makers or critics, should perhaps visit a psychiatrist.