Summary
With the help of a marriage agency, a young veterinary surgeon, Hugues, manages to find
his ideal wife, Jeanne, who fulfils his main requirement: she is the owner of a large
apartment in Paris. Although they are happy together at first, Hugues begins to
find his wife’s placid behaviour unsettling, suspecting she may be seeing another
man. Jeanne is equally perplexed by her husband’s strange behaviour, as he
buries himself in his research into his animals' powers of perception. When a deadly
serpent goes missing, Hugues becomes convinced that his wife is trying to kill him…
Review
Although it is little known today, L’Alliance is a film which is well
worth seeing, a bizarre mix of black comedy and psychological thriller, which still appears
surprisingly fresh and modern. Its strident, eerie music and the creepy cinematography,
coupled with some even creepier acting performances from Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Carrière,
makes this a compelling drama in paranoia and obsession.
Christian de Chalonge somehow manages to sustain a Hitchcockian level of suspense right
up until the last shot, constantly teasing the viewer but revealing the absolute minimum.
This is one of those films where the spectator has plenty of freedom to make his own interpretation
and draw his own conclusions, making it an ambiguous yet extremely intelligent work of
cinema.
Both the plot (taken from Carrière’s own novel) and film’s construction
are breath-takingly original, allowing the film to develop a unique atmosphere which is
both unsettling (certainly for anyone expecting a conventional film) and totally engrossing.
The film combines the banal with the frighteningly surreal to chilling effect.
© James Travers 2000
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