Casque d'Or (1952)

Despite being set in La Belle Époque, Casque d'Or is not a stuffy period drama. Director Jacques Becker creates a rich and believable world that is also vibrant and contemporary.

The story centres around Marie (Simone Signoret), the girlfriend of Roland, a gangster in a small French town. After a chance meeting, Marie she falls for Georges, a humble carpenter, and her boyfriend's jealousy leads to a fatal showdown.

The subdued tone means little or no histrionics or melodrama, even in the confrontation scene between Georges and Roland. There is no explicit violence, but the coldness and the closeup shots are chilling and uncomfortable. There is no music and glamorization of what is happening.

When Georges goes on the run there is also an interesting contrast between the dark, dense city, full of crime and death and the wide expansive and peaceful countryside.

The haunting finale mirrors the opening. This is a film with a bleak worldview. Georges is an honourable man in a dishonest world. Everyone does the decent thing, and nobody is happy.

The Tenant (1976)

The third in a loose trilogy (along with Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby) linked by themes of urban living, paranoia, and mental decay, The Tenant is one of Roman Polanski’s most personal works. Although bearing some stylistic and thematic similarities to those other two films, it is strikingly different, not least because, by casting himself in the lead, Polanski offers us a troubling journey into his mind.

Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski), a shy man who works as a bureaucrat, takes an apartment in Paris, not knowing the previous tenant, a lady called Simone Choule, tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out the window. Although he is happy at first, the concierge (Shelley Winters), the tough landlord Mr Zy, and the oddly behaved neighbours, all start to get to him. Is he slowly losing his mind? Or, do they want him to go the same way as Simone?

Coming after Chinatown, an American film with American stars, The Tenant feels like a deliberate decision by Polanski to get back to his lower budget, European roots. Pretty much the whole film is seen through the eyes of Trelkovsky, using the classic device of the “unreliable narrator”, and starts in a fairly straightforward, even low key fashion, playing many of the scenes for laughs, albeit sometimes uncomfortable ones (and showcasing Polanski’s skill as a comic actor). However, as the tone gradually turns increasingly dark, surreal and paranoid, the plot twists and camera angles grow ever more disorientating.  The bleak world created is one where the weak will always be harassed and bullied by those stronger than them, or worse, those just as weak as they are, and the other characters are largely grotesque caricatures, in keeping with the nightmarish and darkly comic feel.

The casting by Polanski of himself in the lead role is one of the most interesting aspects of The Tenant, and there are a few reasons that I can think of as to why would have done this. First, is narcissism, and why not, as at the time he certainly had a reputation as an egomaniac. Secondly it may have been for practical reasons, as, working without Hollywood dollars, why not save some cash on stars salaries? Thirdly, as well as an egomaniac, he also had a reputation as a control freak, and after his well-publicised run-ins with Faye Dunaway on Chinatown, perhaps he wants a lead actor he can easily exert some control over.

However, what if it was done as a deliberate artistic decision?  This would make the film an intensely personal vision of his own paranoia and persecution complex, inviting us in to share it, as opposed to Repulsion, where he is inviting us to watch someone else, from a distance. It comes from the period after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn baby at the hands of the Manson Family, and just before fleeing the US and possible jail time for sexually assaulting a 13 year old girl, so there would be no shortage of dark things going on in his head.

The "twist" ending is the only real disappointment in The Tenant, and anyone who has seen a few episodes of The Twilight Zone or Tales of The Unexpected will see it coming. Aside from that, this is a disturbing vision of hell, a hell created by oneself as much as by other people.

Plein Soleil (1960)

Sometimes the most disturbing films are not those that are obviously shocking but those that slowly creep under your skin and Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon) is a classic example of this. The first on-screen appearance of Patricia Highsmith’s supremely cold-hearted villain Tom Ripley, director René Clément brilliantly mixes elements of Hitchcock with a decidedly French New Wave approach, and Alain Delon gives a charismatic, star-making performance as Ripley.

         

Based on Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Ripley” (filmed again in 1999 with Matt Damon as Ripley), the plot sees Tom Ripley in Italy, living it up on a boat with his wealthy friend, Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet). Greenleaf’s father has employed Ripley to persuade his son to return to the US. However, Greenleaf Jr., ensconced on a boat, travelling the Italian coast with his girlfriend Marge, has no such plans – and Ripley may have more sinister intentions than Philippe realises.

The relationship between Ripley and Greenleaf drives the first part of the story, but even that is never entirely straightforward. Ripley starts as a clumsy, slightly dim, subservient "little brother" to Greenleaf, going along with his behaviour, as Greenleaf throws his father's money away like confetti.  Eventually the whole film starts to revolve purely around Ripley, and he remains a fascinating, enigmatic character throughout. His motives are ambiguous, never as simply explainable as, for example, greed, envy, coveting Marge or even the need to "possess" or become Greenleaf, even though they may be all or none of those things.

Alain Delon is magnetic, looking a mixture of baby faced innocence and ridiculously handsome movie star. He is completely convincing as Ripley, and the switch in dynamic and behaviour, from charmer to amoral psychopath is creepy and chilling.

Plein Soleil has a number parallels with the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Most obviously is the fact that Hitch made a big screen version of another Highsmith novel, Strangers on a Train. There are other thematic similarities to the work of Hitchcock, such as murder, loss of identity, and relationships.

However, in some ways, in this film at least, Clement is the opposite of Hitchcock. He employs a number of techniques that are synonymous with the French New Wave of filmmaking, particularly the way the film is grounded very much in real life. Therefore, instead of filming the sequences on Greenleaf’s ship in a studio with an obviously projected backdrop, they are filmed out at sea, with a handheld camera, on an actual boat. This makes the actual scenes of them struggling to regain control of the ship in choppy waters, especially when being thrown overboard, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, almost unbearably tense, as there are clearly no special effects or stuntmen in use here.

The only real disappointment is the ending, which deviates from the novel. It feels like a needless concession to morality and jars noticeably with the amoral tone of the rest of the film. Nevertheless, there is still an air of ambiguity to the conclusion, and given the situations, Ripley has previously extricated himself from, maybe things are not as clear-cut as they might appear.