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Deadly Circuit

1983, Movie, NR, 120 mins

Deadly Circuit: Review

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Versatile director Claude Miller invests this pitch black comedy's mise-en-scene with both quizzical humor and considerable tension. Divorced from his embittered wife, Detective Beauvoir (Michel Serrault) has earned his nickname — "The Eye" — working for an agency that specializes in rich clients with missing relatives. Though sleuthing is his livelihood, Beauvoir's passion is his search for his long-lost daughter; the last clue his wife sent was a 1961 high school class photo. Beauvoir agrees to trace the whereabouts of Paul Hugo (Philippe Lelievre), scion of the wealthy Hugo Family and soon spots the missing heir with a golddigger who's calling herself Catherine Leiris (Isabelle Adjani) — actually changes her name as often as her boyfriends. Beauvoir later sees Catherine dump Paul's corpse into a lake, and a fatherly hunch tells him that this killer is his daughter! Watching the predatory Catherine from a distance, Beauvoir even tidies up her room after her next killing. Happy to be playing guardian angel, the possessive Beauvoir is none too pleased when Catherine falls in love with blind architect Ralph Forbes (Sami Frey). Revealing that he shares some of Catherine's sociopathic inclinations, Beavoir pushes Forbes in front of a bus. Furthermore, he worries that if he was able to catch onto Catherine, blackmailers could too; in fact, a greedy duo shows up with plans to put the screws on her. Beavoir turns them against each other. Beauvoir later meets his "daughter" face to face but doesn't reveal his identity. Realizing that she wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, Beauvoir dons a bulletproof vest before she shoots him and steals his money to finance her getaway. How long can the obsessive private eye go on enabling this blank-faced murderess? Michael and Jacques Audiard's clever script, adapted from Mark Behm's novel Eye of the Beholder, fairly drips with irony and Miller inverts the typical cat-and-mouse thriller conventions to produce a treatise on parental loss. Whether Catherine is Beauvoir’s progeny or not is really beside the point, as the lonely private eye finds his purpose in this twisted mystery. Behm's novel was filmed again in 1999 as EYE OF THE BEHOLDER. leave a comment --Robert Pardi
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