I don't know if it will be possible for me to discuss Julien Duvivier's Panique without comparing it to Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989), its remake. It has been over a year since I saw Monsieur Hire, but I seem to remember it being very different from Panique. I never got the feeling that Leconte's Hire was a bad or strange person; he was just an isolated voyeur. But there is definitely something...strange...about Duvivier's Hire. He is also more explicitly coded as an "other" within the community because of his Jewish background. I seem to remember Leconte's Hire being more passive, but Duvivier's Hire seems to get a weird pleasure from toying with the woman's boyfriend and the police. Also, the impact of Duvivier's Hire's betrayal has less of an impact because we watch the villains calculate and execute the double-cross whereas it practically came out of nowhere in Monsieur Hire. That's not to say that the ending of Panique isn't powerful. The last third of the film seems to evoke Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), another film where an innocent man is hounded and destroyed by a community with a lynch-mob mentality. The concluding scenes of Panique are downright electric, aided in no small part by Nicolas Hayer’s brilliant cinematography which easily matches the crème de la crème of Hollywood. His interiors and dialogue scenes are moody and dark and the crowd scenes vibrate with captivating energy. One of these days I'll have to re-watch this film back-to-back with Monsieur Hire so that I can confirm (or disprove) my observations about how they are different.
8/10
--------------------
I later revisited this film during my coverage of the 2016 New York Film Festival. Here's the link to my review. I still award this film an 8/10 rating.
http://theretroset.com/2016-new-york-film-festival/
No comments:
Post a Comment