Deadly Circuit

Beauvoir is a private detective. His work is finding missing people and usually reporting them to whoever pays. His own daughter disappeared years ago; he never found her. On a new job he is watching a woman. She marries a man, then the man dies and she disappears with the money. Then she marries another man in another city. Beauvoir sees it and does not go to the police. He keeps watching her. Sometimes he helps without leaving a trace; he removes evidence, misleads a witness. She notices that someone is there and does not know who. Claude Miller directs. Michel Serrault plays Beauvoir and Isabelle Adjani the woman; Guy Marchand and Stéphane Audran are in the cast. It is a French production, made in 1983. The source is Marc Behm's novel; the same book was filmed again years later. The matter it treats is substitution; the man is looking for his lost daughter in this woman and does not say so even to himself. The narrative has the two barely speak; their relation is built through looks and distance. The film uses the shape of the crime picture but is not trying to solve a crime. The music is by Carla Bley and the score sets its strange register. The character Isabelle Adjani plays appears under a different identity in each section and her look keeps changing. The narrative passes no moral judgment and does not absolve the detective either. The ending gives no closure. Its limit is tone; the narrative is cold, the characters closed, and the pace uneven. Who it is for: viewers who like French crime films and strange narratives of obsession. Who it is not for: it is cold, closed, and the ending unresolved.