The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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.

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.