The Resurrection of Paul Vecchiali

Now being shown for the first time in the U.S., Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler holds a key to understanding movies as personal obsession — and personal expression. That key’s been lost since its premiere in 1970.

Vecchiali unlocks the idiosyncratic genius that links such remarkable films as Jacques Demy’s Lola (1962) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982), but it’s of particular interest now, especially when a better-known celebrity-director can dupe naïve filmgoers through superficial means, as in the case of David Fincher’s The Killer.

Discovering The Strangler enriches appreciation of how playful and poetic movies can be. The murder-mystery plot goes beyond guilty titillation and reveals an understanding of human nature. Vecchiali’s diary of serial killer Émile (Jacques Perrin, the star of Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort) begins with his psychologically obscure childhood trauma and then jumps to adulthood, when his alienation is widely reflected — in exploitative media projections of social crises and daily customs that regulate how isolated individuals meet.

Émile is a psychopath, somewhere between Jack the Ripper and the “Merry Widow” killer in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Anna (Eva Simonet) feels drawn to his menace after seeing homicide inspector Dangret (Julien Guiomar) on a TV program, and she volunteers to help him lure and catch Émile.

All three are connected by their eccentricities. Guiomar’s hyper-masculine Dangret will become the fulcrum between Émile, who confesses to him, and Anna, who falls in love with him. Vecchiali formulated this politically centered triangle from left-radical theory. (Hints of Michel Foucault surface in a violent, erotic climax.)

Vecchiali, who died earlier this year at age 92, was a prolific, avant-garde maverick. He was known as the producer of Chantal Akerman’s feminist art-film Jeanne Dielman. This is not so bad as it seems because that political incentive pushed Vecchiali’s storytelling in a direction that saved him from the soulless nihilism of Fincher’s The Killer. The Strangler (with its intimation of The Stranger, by Camus) can be enjoyed as a visit to a world stripped of its protective moral façade. Vecchiali upends movie conventions as well as the sensationalism of Europe’s giallo murder-mystery genre. And instead of creating a Millennial screed about intersectional victimhood, he probes the personalities of his outsider characters who inhabit a desolate, transient underworld where desperate figures pursue romance and fate. (The train-station stalking scene anticipates Patrice Chéreau’s landmark debut film L’homme blessé / The Wounded Man.)

During Émile’s confrontation with an aged actress (Hélène Surgère), they exchange aesthetic appreciation of silk scarves and reenact a scene from the Gnecchi opera La Rosiera: “You mustn’t die unhappy,” promises the altruistic killer. “I love tragedy,” he sympathizes. It’s in the tradition of Jean Cocteau’s star-crossed The Eagle Has Two Heads. Then I recalled that Surgère went on to star as the actress-mentor in André Téchiné’s I Don’t Kiss, from 1991, and that Téchiné’s protégé Jacques Nolot would create a similar otherworldly milieu in La Chatte à deux têtes (2002).

Throughout The Strangler, individuals come to terms with furtive sexuality, yet its danger is out in the open — visualized in settings that suggest both futuristic sci-fi artifice and film-noir risk.  (The bold 1991 Ken Russell–Theresa Russell satire Whore also takes place in this fantasyland.) Strangers cruise on streets, and a nightclub chanteuse sings to sailors of her desire and doom:

I’ll make myself a sailor
As long as the sea opens her arms to me
Take me to the sea where you hear the words of the last sailor.

What an extraordinary moment — a key to cinema’s history of outsiders by legendary artists. It’s both post-Demy and pre-Fassbinder. Vecchiali’s murder mystery plays like a perverse fairy tale, unfolding the secret history of a special genre of film. Fincher’s The Killer and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon either ignore or parody passion, and this inhumanity threatens to turn movies and cultural history into alien territory. But in The Strangler, the transference of pain and isolation from Émile (who always leaves behind a scarf reminiscent of his childhood) to a series of forlorn women reminds us of our fragile humanity. It amounts to emotional politics rather than identity politics.