Review of Mort un dimanche de pluie

This reasonably obscure French thriller, made in '86, is an enormous missed opportunity. Its first half is pregnant with suspense and dread. Its second half falls apart completely and is virtually a different movie. The tone changes. The plot becomes implausible. The characters behave as if prodded off-screen by the writers. Was director/writer Joel Santoni forced to rewrite his movie during production? It looks like it. An architect (Jean Pierre Bacri), his wife (Nicole Garcia) and their daughter (Cerise Leclerc) live in a strange glass house in the countryside. Into their home and lives come an armless man with a hook (Jean Pierre Bisson), his wife (Dominique Levant) and their seemingly mute daughter. Bisson lost his arm on a construction site and feels that Bacri owes him some kind of compensation for the accident. So, as a form of amends to Bisson, the couple are employed by Bacri to maintain the grounds of the house and babysit LeClerc, their very pretty daughter. It becomes apparent to us (the viewers) very early on that Mr. Armless and his Mrs. are a pair of psycho nutjobs, but it's not so obvious to Bacri and Garcia. The woman physically and verbally abuses Leclerc, while appearing to treat her own traumatized daughter with self-conscious kindness. Bacri goes off the deep end on several occasions when he assaults some visitors to the house and breaks down in Levant's arms, whimpering like the whack job he is. Director Santoni employs a subtle style to convey the increasing tension and jeopardy that has come to this once peaceful house in the country. Then he ruins everything. After Bacri arrives home to find his pre-teen daughter roped naked to a toilet downstairs, Levant lounging around in his wife's lingerie, and evidence that Levant was drugging his daughter, he appears upset, but not too upset. When his wife returns home and he informs her of the day's atrocities, she seems upset, too, but not upset enough to not head upstairs with her husband and casually make love. Before too long, the crazy couple return and begin killing. The film turns into a bad slasher movie with everybody behaving irrationally. When Garcia is confronted by Mr. Armless and grabs a meat cleaver to protect herself, she hits him with it and runs, throwing the cleaver (her only weapon) away. She also slips into a red dress before she gets chased through the woods after the scriptwriters come up with a lame reason why she should wear it. Obviously, the dress looks good on Garcia as she runs through the rain, but what happened to the realism established in the film's first half? Vladimir Cosma, who scored the memorable "La Gloire de mon père", provides a moody score for the film's first half, but resorts to obvious slasher stings when the murders begin. Interestingly, some of this film's more creepy, abstract cues ended up in "La Gloire de mon père", a far more consistent movie (though not a thriller). A special mention must go to Cerise Leclerc who is superb as the target of Levant's psychosis. We feel for her terrible ordeal and are grateful that her fate is not as tragic as others close to her. For those who are keeping stats -- the film features brief frontal nudity when the girl is found roped to a toilet and Garcia's breasts are seen briefly in a disrobing scene. Certainly a film worth a viewing, but one that could have been a classic along the lines of "Wait Until Dark" if it had been true to the tone it established early on.