The Blue Villa (1995)

The Blue Villa (1995)
"Un bruit qui rend fou" (original title)
100 min

Country: France | Belgium | Switzerland
Language: Greek | French

Directors: Dimitri de Clercq, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Writers: Alain Robbe-Grillet (dialogue), Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenplay)
Stars: Fred Ward, Arielle Dombasle, Charles Tordjman


"The Blue Villa" -- whose French title is "Un Bruit Qui Rend Fou" (A Noise Which Makes Mad") -- is an intellectual detective story with a hauntingly lyrical surface, tortured or sinister characters, perverse beauty and intriguing riddles. It also has a highly talented cast: actors whose absorption in their bizarre roles (Fred Ward as the enigmatic wanderer Frank, Charles Tordjman as the guilt-racked screenwriter Nord) or dazzling beauty (Arielle Dombasle as bordello-madame Sarah-la-Blonde) make them fascinating to watch.

Unlike previous Robbe-Grillet movies, like 1966's "Trans-Europ- Express" or 1983's "La Belle Captive," this one doesn't strike you as an often-sterile intellectual exercise tarted up with cold, chic eroticism and fancy game-playing. The old elements may be there, but they're humanized, poeticized.

Like almost every movie Robbe-Grillet has made, "The Blue Villa" suggests an intricate puzzle or maze. But, as in "Last Year at Marienbad," "Villa" has images that grip you. Perhaps that's because, once again, novelist Robbe-Grillet has strong visual collaborators. Director Alain Resnais and cinematographer Sacha Vierny (who now works for Peter Greenaway) were responsible for the stunning surfaces of "Marienbad." Robbe-Grillet's co-director Dimitri de Clercq and cinematographer Hans Meier perform similar, if not as spectacular, roles here.

"Villa" is set on a mysterious Mediterranean island that gleams gold during the day and bluish-black at night, full of streets that suggest the Surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. The tale reconstructs the apparent murder (or disappearance) of a young girl named Santa, and the reappearance of her lover and suspected killer, Frank (Ward). We learn their fates, initially, from Santa's stepfather, Nord (Charles Tordjman), a seedy and tormented figure who is dictating the events, in the form of a screenplay, into a tape recorder.

But Nord, we soon discover, may be lying about everything. In the eyes of gruff inspector Thieu (Dimitri Poulikakos), he is the prime suspect. And Santa may not be dead, Frank not the apparition he seems (though he has returned, ominously, on a ship with crimson sails). The clues to most of these puzzles lie in the local bordello of Sarah-la-Blonde, where an endless mah-jongg game among the customers reminds us of the famous pick-up-the-matchsticks game in "Marienbad."

The inspirations for "The Blue Villa" are bizarre and diverse: Richard Wagner's opera "The Flying Dutchman," the great Oriental movie melodramas of Josef Von Sternberg and Michelangelo Antonioni's '60s and '70s art films.

Both Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film classic "Rashomon" and Robbe- Grillet's own literary experiments, in his novels and films, lie behind the movie's strange structure. As in "Rashomon," we are constantly being shown opposing viewpoints on the same events. As in "L'Homme Qui Vent," we cannot trust the scriptwriter who begins narrating the movie we watch.(Chicagotribune)