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The Strangler, 1970
On the streets of Paris, the innocuous looking Emile (Jacques Perrin) goes out night after night to find and kill women he deems to be too sad and lonely to live, strangling them with white scarves he makes at home. Desperate to catch Emile is detective Dangret (Julien Guiomar), who ends up posing as a psychiatrist in order to lure the killer out. Also in the mix are Anna (Eva Simonet), a lonely woman who seems to want to be Emile’s victim, and “La Chacal” (Paul Barge), a violent, opportunistic thief who happily robs Emile’s victims once they’re dead.
At times wonderfully moody and visually evocative, a somewhat lackluster premise keeps the film in subdued and at times cliched territory.
It’s not necessarily the fault of a movie when it falls in the shadow of another movie that tackles similar themes or plot points. For me, this film could not escape the shadow of Stranger by the Lake, another movie in which longing and violence tangle and where death might be a price to pay for an end to loneliness.
In Stranger by the Lake, however, the film takes time to establish the strong erotic attraction between the (possible) killer and his (possible) victim. But in The Strangler, Emile merely wanders the various avenues in search of the women he can just tell are so sad that they need to die. The jolt from the film comes from the way that the women lean into his deadly embrace, the intimacy of being murdered being vastly superior to another night of spinsterhood. There’s a whole subgenre of movies where women are victimized and, brace yourselves, they actually like it, and this one falls into a lot of the pitfalls of those films.
Something the film never quite gets around is wanting to have things both ways. On the one hand, the movie makes sure to give us a peek at Emile’s traumatic past that set him into the very specific need to kill women. But on the other hand, the movie wants us to believe that Emile is basically always right! It’s mostly accepted that these women are glad to die, and it’s never really discussed that . . . maybe they just needed a good cry, a glass of water, and a good night’s sleep. Emile’s past lampshades the fact that he only targets women (because we all know that lonely men with low self esteem aren’t something that exist). Paul Barge’s opportunistic thief is there seemingly mainly to boost the notion that Emile is in any way moral. Hey, guys, he kills people because he’s taking mercy on them---can you believe that someone would want to do something as depraved as stealing a purse?!?!?!?
Where the film gets a lot more interesting is in the last third, where things get a lot weirder. There’s a great sequence where Emile looks around him and we see the depravity that he anticipates in other people. Notably, despite Emile only targeting women, in this sequence we start in a very predictable place---a woman being assaulted by a group of men who tear her clothing off, and brace yourselves, but eventually she likes it!---but then we see a man stripped naked and beaten to death in the street, a couple fighting in a car, a woman shooting a man in the face, two men stabbing another man. Emile seems to see everyone as both a potential victim and a potential assailant, and we can see in Perrin’s portrayal of the character just how overwhelming this is.
The last third is also where we get Emile’s first failure, the unsuccessful attempted murder of a sex worker. And unlike the other victims, here we can see that Emile is fully projecting onto Claire (Nicole Courcel), whose only complaint is that she’s having a slow night and longs for some non-transactional intimacy. Significantly, Claire does have a support group---a whole crew of other sex workers and a woman who runs a cafe and looks after the women, chiding them to cut down on their smoking and eat their dinner before it gets cold. When she screams, unlike Emile’s other victims, her friends come sprinting through the park to come to her side.
It’s in this final third that the film really begins to explore the way that the characters are all projecting onto each other, and the way that they seek to exploit each other to get what they want. Emile begins to question his own actions, and without his murder as a dark center, the secondary characters in his orbit start to wobble. It’s a very strong ending, and hilariously this act seems to be kicked off by a sequence in which a man walking with a female friend explains to her about how he had to reevaluate his sexuality after his first wife talked him into letting her put a few fingers in his butt during sex. There’s a charming mix of humor and empathy that coheres in the final act, and I wish the whole film had been in this gear.
Despite not totally loving the character of Emile, I do have to give Perrin credit for his portrayal of a man who is basically living the life that’s a stereotype of how he imagines his victims. Emile spends evenings at home---when he’s not out murdering---knitting hit little murder scarves and hanging out with his beloved dog. While I likewise had mixed feelings about Anna, Simonet gives an expressive performance. Both Perrin and Simonet evolve their portrayals as the film goes on, showing different types of vulnerability and determination.
Not uniformly strong, but worth it for the last act.
The Strangler, 1970
On the streets of Paris, the innocuous looking Emile (Jacques Perrin) goes out night after night to find and kill women he deems to be too sad and lonely to live, strangling them with white scarves he makes at home. Desperate to catch Emile is detective Dangret (Julien Guiomar), who ends up posing as a psychiatrist in order to lure the killer out. Also in the mix are Anna (Eva Simonet), a lonely woman who seems to want to be Emile’s victim, and “La Chacal” (Paul Barge), a violent, opportunistic thief who happily robs Emile’s victims once they’re dead.
At times wonderfully moody and visually evocative, a somewhat lackluster premise keeps the film in subdued and at times cliched territory.
It’s not necessarily the fault of a movie when it falls in the shadow of another movie that tackles similar themes or plot points. For me, this film could not escape the shadow of Stranger by the Lake, another movie in which longing and violence tangle and where death might be a price to pay for an end to loneliness.
In Stranger by the Lake, however, the film takes time to establish the strong erotic attraction between the (possible) killer and his (possible) victim. But in The Strangler, Emile merely wanders the various avenues in search of the women he can just tell are so sad that they need to die. The jolt from the film comes from the way that the women lean into his deadly embrace, the intimacy of being murdered being vastly superior to another night of spinsterhood. There’s a whole subgenre of movies where women are victimized and, brace yourselves, they actually like it, and this one falls into a lot of the pitfalls of those films.
Something the film never quite gets around is wanting to have things both ways. On the one hand, the movie makes sure to give us a peek at Emile’s traumatic past that set him into the very specific need to kill women. But on the other hand, the movie wants us to believe that Emile is basically always right! It’s mostly accepted that these women are glad to die, and it’s never really discussed that . . . maybe they just needed a good cry, a glass of water, and a good night’s sleep. Emile’s past lampshades the fact that he only targets women (because we all know that lonely men with low self esteem aren’t something that exist). Paul Barge’s opportunistic thief is there seemingly mainly to boost the notion that Emile is in any way moral. Hey, guys, he kills people because he’s taking mercy on them---can you believe that someone would want to do something as depraved as stealing a purse?!?!?!?
Where the film gets a lot more interesting is in the last third, where things get a lot weirder. There’s a great sequence where Emile looks around him and we see the depravity that he anticipates in other people. Notably, despite Emile only targeting women, in this sequence we start in a very predictable place---a woman being assaulted by a group of men who tear her clothing off, and brace yourselves, but eventually she likes it!---but then we see a man stripped naked and beaten to death in the street, a couple fighting in a car, a woman shooting a man in the face, two men stabbing another man. Emile seems to see everyone as both a potential victim and a potential assailant, and we can see in Perrin’s portrayal of the character just how overwhelming this is.
The last third is also where we get Emile’s first failure, the unsuccessful attempted murder of a sex worker. And unlike the other victims, here we can see that Emile is fully projecting onto Claire (Nicole Courcel), whose only complaint is that she’s having a slow night and longs for some non-transactional intimacy. Significantly, Claire does have a support group---a whole crew of other sex workers and a woman who runs a cafe and looks after the women, chiding them to cut down on their smoking and eat their dinner before it gets cold. When she screams, unlike Emile’s other victims, her friends come sprinting through the park to come to her side.
It’s in this final third that the film really begins to explore the way that the characters are all projecting onto each other, and the way that they seek to exploit each other to get what they want. Emile begins to question his own actions, and without his murder as a dark center, the secondary characters in his orbit start to wobble. It’s a very strong ending, and hilariously this act seems to be kicked off by a sequence in which a man walking with a female friend explains to her about how he had to reevaluate his sexuality after his first wife talked him into letting her put a few fingers in his butt during sex. There’s a charming mix of humor and empathy that coheres in the final act, and I wish the whole film had been in this gear.
Despite not totally loving the character of Emile, I do have to give Perrin credit for his portrayal of a man who is basically living the life that’s a stereotype of how he imagines his victims. Emile spends evenings at home---when he’s not out murdering---knitting hit little murder scarves and hanging out with his beloved dog. While I likewise had mixed feelings about Anna, Simonet gives an expressive performance. Both Perrin and Simonet evolve their portrayals as the film goes on, showing different types of vulnerability and determination.
Not uniformly strong, but worth it for the last act.