Sweet madness

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Movie
German title Sweet madness
Original title Dites-lui que je l'aime
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1977
length 110 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Claude Miller
script Claude Miller
Luc Béraud , based
on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
production Maurice Bernart ,
Hubert Niogret
music Alain Jomy
camera Pierre Lhomme
cut Jean-Bernard Bonis
occupation

The French feature film Süßer Wahn ( Dites-lui que je l'aime , literally: Tell her that I love her) was made in 1977. Claude Miller staged the material, which ranges between crime film and psychodrama, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith . Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou , who both became better known with Die Ausgebufften 1974, are playing together here for the second time. When the César was awarded in 1978, the film was nominated for the best director, the best male and female leading role, sound and set.

action

David is a 27 year old man with a well paid job. He repeatedly wrote letters to a private address in another city. Before climbing the stairs to his rented apartment, he meets the porter who prepares meals for him and his parents living in the old people's home, as well as the young neighbor Juliette, who is in love with shy David and tries to get in touch with him. David's letters are addressed to Lise, with whom he spent much of his childhood very happily. Although she is now married to another man and has one child, he storms her with attempts at contact and lies in wait for her.

After another unsuccessful attempt, he gets involved with Juliette, who begins to take down the passive David on the sofa; but soon he breaks off the act of love and insults Juliette as a slut. David owns the chalet in a remote alpine valley, where he and Lise lived for a while as children, and arranges it for a life together that he provides for himself and her. He calls for the dissolution of her marriage to Gérard, a representative for household electrical appliances, whom he disregards because of his social status. When he shows up at the chalet to talk to David from man to man, despite his revolver, he draws the short straw and has to flee from David quickly in his rickety, now battered car. In a curve he falls into the abyss and is killed. Lise tells David that she will definitely not marry him now. David's reenactments are becoming more and more intrusive. Even Juliette and his friend, the philanderer François, cannot free him from his obsession. In an attempt to take on Lise's role, Juliette dies in the burning chalet. Eventually, David takes Lise prisoner in a swimming pool where he is responsible for her death. In the final shot, the clock turns backwards and the images of the fatal fall run backwards until Lise is alive again.

Genre and themes

In the first half, the plot and narrative means have the characteristics of a crime film . Much remains unsaid, in particular the audience is left in the dark about the protagonists' motives, the relationships they have with one another, and who knows how much. By carefully observing significant details, the film gradually reveals this network. Around the middle the secrets are revealed, and from here Miller deviates significantly from the novel. In the second half, the film is a psychological drama. The protagonists try to fight their way out of the entanglement in which they are stuck. The turning away from the crime genre is also indicative of the fact that the first death that occurs does not go back to a murder, but to a traffic accident and an unfortunate chain of events.

The development from the hidden, the underground to the very clear corresponds to the theme of the film, the growth and culminating of an obsession. Miller shows the destructive power of unleashed passion and how an orderly bourgeois world gradually slips into the morbid. David's obsession is self-contained, inaccessible to everything else but himself. He does not want to admit the time that has passed, nor that Lise is no longer the girl he once knew. In the final scene the images run and the clock hands turn backwards; they are not only intended to undo Lise's death, but are also an expression of his deep desire to turn back time into childhood. In his imagination, their resistance turns into caresses. Sineux saw in David and François two poles of occidental, more specifically French, male sexuality, which is infantile and misogynistic: the blonde, puritan, asexual David loves his love for Lise more than Lise herself, similar to the relationship between Tristan and Isolde , meanwhile François, the Latin, dark, curly, brown type, behaves in an offensive and sexually assertive manner.

Miller explained that he had thought of Depardieu as the ideal cast from the beginning and that he would rather have given up the project than realizing it with a less suitable actor.

criticism

It was Gérard Depardieu's best role up to then, judged Positif in 1977. With his spontaneity he was simply terrifying, monstrous not because he was strange to us, but because on the contrary he looked very familiar. Miou-Miou internalize her role with a wonderfully modulated sensibility. The cast vied for credibility in an absurd, deadly battle. Director Miller uses the scenes and landscapes to expand David's inner state to the visible surroundings. In 2008, Télérama thought the underrated film was exciting and lyrical, showed “nothing of love but the burns” , and Dépardieu played “impressive” .

The film-dienst assessed 1984: "If it weren't for Miller's safe staging, the good psychologization of all people and, above all, Depardieu's art of representation, the film could easily have turned into a banal melodrama full of exaggerated, monstrous feelings." The brilliant Depardieu played them Change of his figure believable and understandable.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c John Pym: This sweet sickness . In: Monthly Film Bulletin , vol. 46, 1979, p. 249
  2. ↑ a b c Philippe Piazzo: Dites-lui que je l'aime . In: Télérama , July 5, 2008
  3. ↑ a b c d Hans Messias: Sweet delusion . In: Film-dienst , No. 16/1984
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Michel Sineux: Le sexe et l'occident . In: Positif , November 1977, pp. 55-59