Director Michel Deville died on February 16 at the age of 91. Caesarized for “Peril in the house”, he had been rejected by the New Wave, but had been able to create his own tone and a work, slightly ironic, which will remain.
Notably known for having signed The Bear and the Doll or even Peril in the House (which had won him the César for Best Director in 1986), the French director Michel Deville died this Thursday, February 16 at the age 91 years old.
Former assistant to Henri Decoin, Michel Deville began making films in the midst of the New Wave (to which he would not belong). After Une Balle dans le canon, the first detective film co-directed by Charles Gérard, he signed Tonight or Never (1961) with screenwriter Nina Companeez. It was the start of a privileged collaboration that would span 11 films and last until 1971, giving a real unity of tone to the first part of Deville’s work.
Both fashion brilliant comedies full of fantasy, which are so many variations on the sentimental and erotic emotions of young people; Adorable Menteuse in 1962, A cause, because of a woman the year after, or even Benjamin or the Memoirs of a virgin in 1968. The balance is maintained there between the playful side of Deville and the moralistic marivaudage specific to Campaneez. When Deville’s universe takes over in the collaboration, the result is Bye bye, Barbara (1969), a film with unusual breaks in tone and disconcerting digressions. When it is the opposite, it gives Raphaël ou le débauché (1971).
Without his favorite screenwriter, Deville adopts a harsher tone. Dossier 51 (1978), where he relentlessly questions manipulation and plays on the ambiguity of beings, marks a turning point in his cinema which will diversify by overlapping genres. With Deep Waters (1981) he analyzes with great finesse the perverse and murderous games of the Trintignant-Huppert couple.
He continued his painting of perversion in Péril en la domicile (1985), a labyrinthine film in which femme fatales, calculating bourgeois and false ingenues rub shoulders, which earned him the César for Best Director. But he tempers his pessimism with the pleasure of filming and playing with words, as demonstrated a year later by the dazzling Paltoquet.
In La Lectrice, he still wields this strangeness of tone through which he indulges in an acid painting of his time (which we find in All Sentences Confounded in 1992, or The Divine Pursuit in 1997). In 2002, he dealt with Vichy France in An almost peaceful world. In 2005, Michel Deville returned to a lighter register with Un fil à la patte, a comic and vaudevillesque piece by Georges Feydeau, adapted by his wife and collaborator Rosalinde Deville, which deals among other things with desire, pleasure and money.
The trailer for “Peril in the Home”, César for Best Director: