Jean Becker’s L'Été meurtrier (1983)

Jean Becker’s L'Été meurtrier is based on Sébastien Japrisot's novel L'Été meurtrier (1977), and is a complex and powerful psychological work, a superior revenge thriller. Isabelle Adjani (Elaine/Elle) won a César for best female actor, and although she initially turned down the role because of the nude scenes she would have to play, she changed her mind and cinema is the better for this decision: this is a significant film in the history of French movies.

L'Été meurtrier at first perhaps seems a conventional enough love story, although a series of flashbacks to some extent explain the reasons for the movie turning around a strange bend. The very sexy 19-year-old Elle flounces around the village in Provence she and her parents – Paula Wieck Devigne (Maria Machado), or 'Eva Braun'* as some villagers call her, and her disabled husband Gabriel (Michel Galabru) – have moved to, and she causes quite a stir. She particularly stirs Fiorimondo Montechiari (Alain Souchon), nicknamed Pin-Pon, and the feeling is mutual: Elle swiftly moves into Pin-Pon's family home, causing quite a stir there. Pin-Pon can't believe his luck, although Elle's open nudity and insulting behaviour and comments hardly have the same effect on Pin-Pon's mother (Jenny Clève), but the almost deaf aunt 'Cognata' (Suzanne Flon) understands more than many give her credit for.

But then, many things here are only half or not at all understood, and (for instance) Elle's literal and figurative short-sightedness is only an indication of the misunderstandings that surround the events in this film. Elle is the product of an especially brutal rape of her mother by three overgrown yobs, a fact of which she is aware, and as the film progresses it is evident that the balance of her mind – already greatly disturbed – becomes increasingly so when she learns  the truth. The man who has been her true father tells her that he killed the rapists, that he no longer has an interest in his own fate, and Elle understands that her years of research have been in vain.

Elle goes mad and has to be institutionalised, although Pin-Pon thinks (as Elle originally did) that the two are still living. So he has to kill two innocent (if contemptible) men. This has a sniff of Greek tragedy: a brilliant film.

* The film is set in the late seventies: Paula is German by origin, and at the time the French hadn't forgotten the Nazi atrocities, so Franco-German racism was still the order of the day with some people. 

Jean Becker's La tête en friche (2010)

Back in June, on my way back from Champagne-Vigny to the Arvert peninsula in south-west France, I accidentally took a wrong turning and found myself entering the town of Pons in Charente-Maritime. As I'd never heard of Pons, I stupidly imagined it to be of no interest, and turned round toward Royan. What I'd missed seeing was what seems to be a lovely place, and it also happens to be the main settting for Jean Becker's La tête en friche, which goes under the ugly and inapproprate English title of My Afternoons with Margueritte (sic) , which Philip French in The Observer accurately notes sounds like an Eric Rohmer movie title. A literal translation would be something like 'The Unplowed Brain', which is clearly unsuitable, but surely a little thought along those lines would have produced a better name.

To the film itself. It's an adaptation of Marie-Sabine Roger's novel of the same name, and centers around the relationship between the sixtysomething Germain Chazes (Gérard Depardieu) and the 95-year-old Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus).  Germain is an amiable, fat, scarcely literate small-time vegetable gardener and handyman who works in the Chez Francine bistrot,  and Margueritte (whose father was semi-literate, hence the unconventional spelling) a charming, lonely, bookish ex-school teacher. This odd couple begin a friendship. As a child, Germain  was bullied at school by his English teacher, and at home by his slightly aggressive and self-destructive mother (played by Claire Maurier); he is even the present butt of jokes about his lack of learning by his drinking partners: he's never really stood a chance in the intellectual stakes. But as Germain and Margueritte's friendship develops, she teaches him some literature, and Germain is extremely eager to make up for lost time.

The film has been called sugar-coated, and The Daily Telegraph - very oddly - called its ending 'unforgivable'. The translated title isn't forgivable, a few of the sub-titles strike an odd chord ('Holy shit!' for 'Putain!', etc), but surely the weirdest thing is to cast the very bright, confidently literate Annette (the striking 33-year-old Sophie Guillemin) as the adoring girlfriend of Germain (the 63-year-old man mountain Depardieu). Anyway, isn't the Telegraph itself guilty of many more unforgivable things than this harmless, delightful - and gloriously French - film?