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The closest you can get to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in French is by watching Mortelle Randonnée. It's a haunted classic a stellar noir and a fatherhood fable rolled into one. You thought you got that one right, Hollywood? Let's take a trip down memory lane, thirty three years ago.

The movie is Shakespearean but mundane. It includes the best giallo murder not filmed by Argento. It does not end well. It is devastating, devastatingly so.

The original material is a pulp novel by Marc Boehm, titled The Ice Maiden. Hollywood remade it with Ashley Judd and Ewan McGregor as The Eye of the Beholder (1999, obviously losing the paternal dimension. The movie is about what you see and what to refuse to see; what you chose to see instead. Scopophilia and fantasy, spectacle and dream.

Main character The Eye (Michel Serrault, formidable), is tasked by his bitchy boss, the fantastically named Mme Schmidt-Boulanger (Genevieve Page, a monument to French diction) to follow and report on the heir of a Belgian shoe-making dynasty. He soon discovers said heir has been victim of a praying mantis (Isabelle Adjani), whose neuroses reflect his: she's lost her father and him his daughter. Only at the end of the movie those two will come across and both will die, one symbolically. A feel-good movie it is not, even though it ends on a soothing note.

The Eye is jaded by a job too easy for his capacities. One look, just one look, case closed. But the Ice Maiden proves to be a tough nut to crack, leading him off track, across Europe and within himself. His opening monologue is anything but a conventional voice-over. It deceptively sets The Eye as a man in need. He's not. It's all crosswords for him, enigmas piled on riddles. He's looking for meaning. He won't find any, or only of the darkest kind. A quantum of solace, too.

It starts in Paris by a carousel and drifts from there, under the pretense of PI work. If you speak French, the movie is delectable from start to finish : it was the last one to benefit from the work of dialog- writer Michel Audiard, father of director Jacques Audiard and author of some of the most cultish sentences in French cinema. It's the French version of screwball comedy, both elegantly written and playfully delivered. Actors here do not miss a syllable or a comma for effect. It's clockwork, respectfully served by director Claude Miller.

The Virgo, symbol of the sweetness of things is revealed as a Capricorn, symbol of winter. In the novel horoscopes played an important role and so do they in the movie. Lucie (the light), as she is first introduced, bumping on The Eye by a carousel, has no plan. She is adrift, as he is. The eye has to travel, so he will follow her, fuming but enthralled.

She seduces men and kill them singing La Paloma (the dove), another virginal deceit from a witch. There is a lot of blood on the first murder scene. The Eye decides to let it slide and they embark on a not-so-merry-go- round. She's now Eve, another maiden. She reaches the peak of her trade: "A mink! Emeralds! What a nice companion you are!" she enthused before killing a second guy she was engaged under a third name. She's a child, she has no ethics or guilt. She's a go-getter, whatever it takes.

Guilt is on The Eye's side after he kills a blind man (ha!), the Ice Maiden's true love (Sami Frey, dashing). It's a sacrifice he will regret to exert and try to cope with, to no avail. It's a zero sum game, a lost- lost. But still they go, relentlessly, from a daylight version of Malcom McLaren's Madam Butterfly video set in Baden Baden to Rome, where the sacrifice takes place.

The way it spirals downward from there is too painful to tell. A very dark comedy, Mortelle Randonnée is as venomously funny as it is tragic. It leaves a strong, bitter after-taste. One has watched this movie repeatedly and can't get tired of it. It's a tantalising object, much too dark to be watched but through the looking glass, and it's impossible to forget. Impossible to un-see.

The French love for American crime novels has been written about many times. Jim Thompson's works have been adapted by many of the leading directors. Truffaut's early career was based largely on this genre; he made Shoot the Pianist from David Goodis's novel, and many of Chabrol's films are taken from American pulp. Claude Miller made his second film Dites-lui que je l'aime from Patricia Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness.

In Mortelle Randonnee, Miller is working with Marc Behm's novel The Eye of the Beholder, which I haven't read. I suppose Miller chose to throw out most of the plot elements of Behm's book; that's the usual practice in France. The theme of obsessional love of a man for the girl he believes to be his daughter is triumphantly brought to life by a great cast, aided by Carla Bley's richly melancholic music (post-modern brass band?), Pierre Lhomme's lovely camera-work (those rain-slicked night shots, the sad neon lights on hotel fronts), the expert choice of sets (Helmut Newton would have loved that German health spa where Catherine meets the lesbian Cora).

Finally, the wonderful cast: Michel Serrault so wistful as the private investigator preparing an endless series of cover-ups of Adjani's killings, he's as good here as he was in Garde à vue; Isabelle Adjani living on her jangled nerves as she criss-crosses Europe in search of new prey; Geneviève Page (who I remember from Belle de jour--the brothel keeper) as the crisp director of the detective agency Serrault works for; the startling transformation of the gorgeous Stéphane Audran into a homely housewife--what a makeup job--who is also tracking Adjani. The last act is darker and more anguished than the preceding ones, the viewer will have to resist the urge to ask what happened to the comic bits.

There's a private detective who keeps an old b/w photo with him. It shows a class of little girls and one of them is his daughter but he doesn't know which one so they're all his daughter. There's a mysterious girl, beautiful and a little sad, she goes around changing names and wigs and killing rich men (but not for their money, the money only the means by which she can sustain herself until she can kill again) and she tells outrageous made-up stories about a father she probably never met. The movie sets itself up as something potentially quirky, a noir patchwork where the dialogue is witty, a corpse is dumped in a lake, and the private dick tails the mysterious woman from murder to murder.

It's around that point when the movie must decide the course, when the crime mystery begins to dissolve into something irrelevant because the private dick is not trying to catch her any more, in fact he starts erasing her traces and lying to his boss, and he calls her "Marie", the name of his long lost daughter, so that we're not asking whys anymore but rather staring obsession straight in the eye. This newfound surrogate daughter becomes a compulsion but it only starts there. It gets confusing, almost surreal like characters can foresee things, but it's an interesting confusion for me because the latenight atmosphere is right and something intuitive is suggested between the two protagonists. It's like we're in the cavelike gloom of a hotel staircase and the plot is used like an oil lamp that serves to increase that gloom and mystery for us and we can't tell at once what is going on on the top floor until we're halfway up there.

At one point there's a TV showing FW Murnau's The Last Laugh and the girl begins fashioning another madeup tale about her father, tailored this time after Emil Janning's hotel porter character in Murnau's movie, the tale is outrageous and weepy like bad melodrama but it's the telling that makes it poignant, like the magnitude of the lie suggests the depth of what is broken. Michel Serrault's private detective is one of the most fascinating movie characters of the 80's, he's methodical in his work but also a little detached from everything around him like Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlow in The Long Goodbye, and the only thing that keeps him going is the pursuit of obsession. Right down to the amazingly sad ending, Mortelle Randonnee is a forgotten gem, a little flawed around the edges and the details sometimes go out of focus like we're in a car and the view from the window is blurred but we stop at places and bizarre things happen there (often at gunpoint) and then we're on the move again, and it's that neon- lit blur of something sad and desperate that makes it fascinating.

Marc Behm had written a screenplay for producer Philip Yordan which was unused but provided the basis for his novel 'Eye of the Beholder'. It is only fitting that the setting of this adaptation by Michel and Jacques Audiard should be changed from North America to France as Behm was an avowed Francophile.

The phrase 'style over substance' could easily apply to the early scenes of Claude Miller's film and although it never ceases to be stylish it gradually draws one in and becomes utterly compelling.

The main thrust of the plot is the distant relationship between Catherine, a bi-sexual serial murderess and private detective Beauvoir who develops a paternal obsession to protect her, even to the point of hiding the bodies of her victims.

That two such disturbed and dysfuntional characters are able to arouse our sympathy is down to Claude Miller's inspired casting of Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani.

Monsieur Serrault proved himself adept at both comedy and tragedy and had previously impressed in this director's 'Garde a vue'. An immensely talented artiste, he again displays an ability to portray someone walking an emotional tightrope. Since being cast by Francois Truffaut as Adele Hugo, Mlle Adjani has gone from strength to strength and excels in unbalanced characters struggling with their inner demons. She possesses an indefinable air of mystery and what one critic referred to as her 'signature stare' serves her well in this.

Full marks must go to the make up artiste who has rendered gorgeous Stéphane Audran unrecognisable, well, almost, as the 'Grey lady' and there is a fascinating performance as a blind millionaire by Sami Frey. The scene of the traffic accident involving Frey and Serrault must have had an especially painful resonance for Serrault as he had lost his teenage daughter in a car crash six years earlier. Indeed that personal tragedy must surely have informed his performance as an older man desperately seeking a young woman as a substitute for the daughter he never knew.

The film did not do well commercially but has since acquired cult status in its native country whilst Stephan Elliott's pointless remake has sunk without trace. Deservedly so.

Mortelle Randonnée is arguably one of France's best noir ever. And one of Isabelle Adjani's brightest hour. You unfortunately have to understand french to fully appreciate Michel Audiard's brilliant, darkly humorous dialogs (and especially Serreault's monologues). Claude Miller's direction is at once classy and precise (very similar to his work on L'Accompagnatrice), while Pierre Lhomme's cinematography is lush when needed, gritty when necessary (mainly during the last third). I read a few bad reviews here and there and I must add, and I know I'm not the first, that the States version, not only the recent DVD but also the TV version and the old VHS, well, has always been the truncated, 95 min. cut. Now, the movie showed everywhere else in the world runs 120 min. sharp. Think about it: it doesn't only mean that almost quarter of the movie is absent, it also means that the editing, fatally, is different, so is the rhythm, the feel, the movie altogether. I saw the DVD and frankly, while the transfer's OK, it doesn't make much of an impression, but then again, think that almost half an hour's gone. I never understood that thing with American distributors and foreign films, as if American moviegoers needed shorter, tighter movies so it won't be too much of a shock. That's ridiculous. Any moviegoer, American or whatever, that goes to the theater and buys a ticket for an Adjani/Serreault movie is obviously not looking for The Rock or Paul Walker. Well, that's what I think anyway. The rating, of course, applies to the official 120 min. version. If you have a chance to see it, don't miss it. A real gem.

This is not what i expected. I thought this was gonna be a crime/thriller movie or something like that. Turns out it is a dark comedy. A deconstruction of crime/noir films, a parody. I liked it a lot. There were a few hilarious scenes but it's not a laughing out loud movie, humor is more dry and subtle. It never became exciting but it was enjoyable all the way. Probably it should have been 10-ish minutes shorter, truth is, it kinda lost steam during the last 40 minutes. But still, it was easy to watch. Serrault was amusing, Adjani was a delight (Ok, a bit of a deadly delight). Don't look for plausibility though, characters were cartoonish and overall it is not a realistic movie. Just go with it and you will probably like it.

Ending was good. There is a minor twist i didn't see it coming which made it more meaningful. Still this is not a great movie, more of an oddity i'd say.

I've watched the 120 minutes version.

...and still does now that I am 42. Serrault and Adjani (an improbable 'incestuous couple' at a first glance, but actually a dreamy duo which really works) are just great. They both look like zombies: two people who died a long time ago and who consider life as a sort of waiting room. They only want to step back into the black&white school photo, when everything was still OK and life worth living. The story verges on the side of madness from the beginning, with Mrs Schmidt-Boulanger (manager of detective agency - beautiful cameo for Geneviève Page, who was the Madam in Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour'). While she's explaining the case to Beauvoir (the detective), he watches dreamily a homeless smashing a window of Schmidt-Boulanger's car, stealing her fur coat and putting it on, parading around on the parking lot, like a model on the catwalk. And the music! Another improbable couple: Carla Bley and Schubert! And the dialogs! Michel and Jacques Audiard wrote one little gem after another. And the black humor! Just sit back, don't expect any believable plot, and ENJOY this little gem from the 80's!

The agency where the middle-aged private detective Beauvoir "The Eye" (Michel Serrault) works is hired by a couple to follow their son that is meeting a woman. Beauvoir is a bitter man that misses his daughter Marie that was taken by her mother years ago, leaving behind only a photo. Soon he finds that the youngster is having an affair with the gorgeous Catherine Leiris (Isabelle Adjani) and Beauvoir imagines that she might be Marie. Out of the blue, Beauvoir sees Catherine dumping the body of the man in a lake, but he does not report his finding. He follows Catherine that travels to another place and discovers that she is a serial-killer that misses her father and kills her lovers. Beauvoir protects Catherine and falls in love with her. When he finally meets her, he invites Catherine for a drink after hours. What will happen to them?

"Mortelle randonnée" is a weird, boring and overrated neo-noir directed by Claude Miller. The plot is repetitive about two needy persons, one that misses his daughter and the other that misses her father, and annoying. It should be shorter and shorter. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Ronda Mortal" ("Mortal Round")

Note: On 12 September 2023, I saw this film again.

Mortelle randonée is a brilliant and somewhat noir-ish thriller with a subtle twist of comedy. Isabelle Adjani's beauty has never been more glowing than here as the central femme fatale, and Michel Serrault manages to be both touching and very funny as the lonesome private eye, in search of a long lost daughter. As an added bonus Carla Bley's sexy and jazzy score is simply stunning and makes this overlooked gem a definite must-see. Director Claude Miller has had a long impressive career – he started out working for Truffaut – but only rarely has his work been this relaxed, cool and yet still magnificently melodramatic. The inferior "Eye of the Beholder" (1999) was based on the same novel (and Ewan McGregor was way to young for the part). The Wellspring DVD contains only heavily edited American release and this version simply doesn't work. Wait for someone to release this wonderful film uncut.(actually TF1 already have - with French subtitles only!)

Behind his front of overflowing bitterness and cynicism, private eye Louis Beauvoir (Serrault), nicknamed L'Oeil, is deeply missing of a child to protect and cheer, while he is tracking down a serial killer, Catherine Leiris (The iris)(Adjani).

The followed young woman will be just half-real, she'll be rather like the private eye dreams her.

Like a picture of innocence in his memory, she should stay untouched and untouchable, so he will involve himself in her flight. Through his eyes and ears, she is a mythomaniac orphan, she has misbehaved, she considers herself as garbage, but she wants fondness, getting a substitutive father's attention by murdering men and women who get too close to her.

The dream can last as long as the soliloquizing self-designated father can stay in tune with his substitute daughter, despite awakening bodies on their road, every bodies that did not have sleepwalker's stare and beat.

We, as viewers, wish the great encounter and the forgiveness. We dream. We are willing to roam.

A long time after we are supposed to be awake and down to earth, we are still humming the main musical theme, or La Paloma, or Schubert's lieder, who all played in the movie.

Mortelle randonnée is an ambiguous and dark fairy tale for adults, sprinkled with bridges and winks. After many viewing, there is still to explore and enjoy in Mortelle randonnée, at least in the version I saw (118 min.).

Mortelle randonnée is only a movie, not somebody. A movie does not think it is good. Only people can think Mortelle randonnée is good, or think it is not. It is a matter of taste. Critics who attribute thoughts or claims to movies, instead of ascribing them to film-makers or critics, should perhaps visit a psychiatrist.

Although the DVD version of this which I saw recently had 24 minutes cut out of it, this film even in its truncated form still stands as a masterly work. Director Claude Miller (the French say 'Millaire') is a Grand Old Man of the French cinema, and this is one of his early films, when he was already making masterpieces. Two years later he made the unforgettable IMPUDENT GIRL with the teenaged Charlotte Gainsbourg. More recently, he has made the equally unforgettable UN SECRET (2007, see my review). Any Miller film is always going to be interesting, gripping, and disturbing, and this one is all of that and more. It is based on a novel by the American writer who settled in France, Marc Behm. The leading character is a real Mr. Anonymous, a loser detective played brilliantly by Michel Serrault, who is so ordinary-looking that nobody ever notices him. As he himself says in the film: 'I look like everybody.' His life was shattered twenty years earlier when his little girl died. His wife had left him four years before, taking the child away. He is haunted and obsessed by this double loss of the desertion and later the death of the child he was never even allowed to know, and his current life is entirely empty. When given a routine assignment to try to identify the girlfriend of a rich young man, when he encounters the girl, played with haunted intensity by Isabelle Adjani, something clicks. For much of the film we are led to believe that he thinks that she is his lost daughter, and only much later do we realize that he is merely pursuing her as a fantasy substitute, because he knows very well that his real daughter died as a child. When he realizes that Adjani is living on the edge of desperation just as he is, he feels a spiritual kinship with her. Very soon he realizes that she is a psychotic murderess, and has countless aliases. She compulsively kills and robs, barely stopping long enough to catch her breath between victims. Serrault follows her from country to country, watches her trysts through windows, even witnesses her disposing of a body, slitting a throat, and being a very bad girl indeed. But he feels compelled to protect her, because he knows that she is living as much in a mad fantasy as he himself is. He becomes emotionally and psychologically complicit in her crimes, and even disposes of one of the bodies for her. But he does not speak to her and she never notices him because he is such a nonentity. This is a strange tale of affiliation by osmosis, where two people who do not communicate nevertheless come to live a symbiotic existence, one oblivious and the other passionately devoted, as they travel continuously together from crime scene to crime scene. The film is immensely sad, not only as regards Serrault and the tragic hole in his existence, his personal néant ('nothingness'), but also the demented round of murder pursued by the girl, who is powerless to stop herself, who is in the grip of a compulsion which is equally a 'nothingness'. We must assume that Marc Behm came under the influence of Sartre and the existentialists, as all this 'nothingness' was what they all wrote about the whole time. The existentialists were always such a pain that I am delighted that they have all sunk without trace and no one even gives them a thought today: celebrities one day, and forgotten the next. But whereas there is nothing sad about their fate, there is genuine tragedy about the characters in this film, including some of the minor ones, such as the blackmailer's jilted girlfriend, a poignant portrait of despair which is heartbreaking. Yes, this is a film about people at the very edge of desperation, and we must never be contemptuous of people who are driven so far that in their wild frenzy they become capable of anything. It is very much a tribute to the sensitivity of Claude Miller that we are able to feel sympathy even for the tormented Adjani character. That is the sign of a real film-maker.

Dark, cruel, even disgusting for moments -and the ending will crush your heart, no matter how hardened it is.

Isabelle Adjani is just too sexy for words.

Just watch it. It's worth it.

One of the best movies ever. Very dark, very deadpan, perfect acting. Great script, too.

The La Paloma version in the blind man's villa is by Hans Albers.

I watched EYE OF THE BEHOLDER a couple of weeks ago. It was the remake of this film, itself adapted from Marc Behm's novel. Both were. Each of these two movies is pretty good, but very different in the way of filming and also story telling. I would say this one is closer to the book, at least about the pear eater female character played by Isabelle Adjani. As far as I remember, it is not spoken about in the 1999 film. I also appreciate the Geneviève Page's performance as the Michel Serrault's boss, she reminds me Paul Meurisse in her way of talking, at least in her first sequence. Pretty amusing. This is the best French crime mystery movie from the eighties. a sad and poor decade for the French movie industry.