Eaux Profondes (Deep Water) [1981]

 Three decades before Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert, two giants of French cinema, played father and daughter in Haneke’s devastating masterwork Amour, they had their first onscreen collaboration – and the only one for many years – as a couple conjoined in a toxic marriage in Michel Deville’s saucy, pulpy and criminally under-watched Eaux Profondes. This striking rendition of Patricia Highsmith’s magnificent novel Deep Water mirrored the author’s deliciously warped portrayal of a noxious relationship and closet sociopathy, and consequently emerged as a terrific adaptation of Highsmith, nearly at par with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Clément’s Plein Soleil and Wenders’ The American Friend. Middle-aged Vic (Trintignant) is a soft-spoken, well-to-do man of private passions – be it his vocation as a perfumier or his oddball hobby of petting snails in his garage – and lives a sedate life at a provincial French town. His friends, however, are concerned for him due to his placid demeanour despite his striking young wife Mélanie (Huppert) – with whom he has a doting daughter – openly taking young men as lovers. What they don’t know is that, he probably loves being cuckolded by his promiscuous wife who, in turn, teases him with her scorching sensuality and adulteries; what she, however, doesn’t know is that, there’s a violent streak under his sociable persona that’s about to snap. The vivid visuals, jazzy score, lurid carnality and seething violence boldly evoked a touch of giallo and B-movies. Trintignant was stunning in an atypical role, while Huppert was tantalizing as a coquettish seductress in the same year as her similarly sultry turn in Tavernier’s blazing tour de force Coup de Torchon, which too – incidentally – was a powerhouse adaptation of American crime literature.

Director: Michel Deville

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Neo-Noir/Marital Thriller

Language: French

Country: France