L'homme en colere (Claude Pinoteau, 1979)

The quality of Claude Pinoteau’s L’homme en colere might be summed up by the slapdash misspelling of several lead actors’ names in the opening credits, and by the presumably inadvertent omission of Lisa Pelikan’s name altogether from the end-roll. This merely sums up a pervasive quality of vagueness and displacement, typical of the era’s co-productions, and extended here in consistently perplexing, and thus rather fascinating manner. Lino Ventura plays Romain Dupre, a retired pilot summoned from France to Montreal by the reported death of his estranged son; the corpse turns out to be that of another man, setting off Dupre in search of the truth. Much of the interest merely comes from seeing Ventura (inherently searching and substantial, but less compelling and engaged here than in his previous year’s visit to Britain in Jack Gold’s Medusa Touch) in particularly time- and place-stamped settings: at a Montreal disco; in a restaurant where the menu is splattered with gaudy pictures of horrible-looking food; at a Canadiens’ hockey game; standing in front of a marquee for Burt Lancaster’s Go Tell the Spartans; and most spectacularly of all, playing scenes (albeit in different tongues) with a dubbed Angie Dickinson, faintly echoing her Hawksian peak as a woman with little distinct direction or agenda, who almost instanteously hitches her fortunes to his. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, working its way to a distinctly under-powered new beginning between father and son (the film’s deployment of flashbacks to evoke their past conflicts is among its least artful points, which is indeed saying something). The movie conforms to all the underwhelming preconceptions about the dominant Canadian cinema of the time, exhibiting little or no artistic personality, relying on extremely cursory plotting and staging, and seeming to be besotted with the availability of international “names” (Donald Pleasence also turns up for two brief, meaningless scenes). As noted, I managed to extract a few compensations from it; more discerning viewers may not even come away with that much.