Deep Water

Victor is a perfumer living on Jersey, considerably older than his wife Mélanie. Mélanie is constantly seen with other men and makes no secret of it. Victor never objects; the islanders watch this not with sympathy but with curiosity. Rather than react, he makes a joke: he says he killed one of her former lovers. Nobody laughs. After a while, men around Mélanie really do start dying. There is a child in the middle of it: their daughter, who watches everything. Michel Deville directs, adapting Patricia Highsmith's novel, with Isabelle Huppert as Mélanie and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Victor. Ninety-five minutes. Highsmith's usual subject is here too: how an ordinary man turns into a murderer by excusing himself one step at a time.