Director-cinephile Quentin Tarantino was deeply marked by this film released in the 70s which scared him like few feature films before it.
Summarizing the plot of a film as atmospheric as Deliverance does not quite do it credit. It’s simple: a group of four guys from Atlanta who decide to canoe down a river before the completion of a dam floods the area for nearly 15 km. But it’s not this starting point that counts, what counts in Délivrance is what happens afterwards.
This difficult film creating discomfort plunges hikers into a nightmare of murder, savagery and even rape that will prove traumatic for all four. They are interpreted by Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox.
Warner Bros.
It is this tragic event in particular that Quentin Tarantino emphasizes in his book Cinema Speculations, and which he considers essential to the analysis of John Boorman’s film:
The men in “Deliverance” face a social taboo – the rape of one of the males in the group – which, to one degree or another, will hover over them for the rest of their lives. (…) But men have the opportunity to bury their secret, because once the dam is finished, the whole region will be swallowed up over a distance of fifteen kilometres. (…)
And Tarantino continues:
“In other words, what happens in the woods stays in the woods. The four men can return to their ordinary lives: apart from them, no one will know anything about it. And the film holds up a mirror to the spectators by pushing them to s ask: ‘And you, what would you do?'”
“As people were afraid to swim after Jaws, I, after Délivrance, had the tokens to go camping in the woods!”
Warner Bros.
With Deliverance, Boorman manages to create a permanent tension, based on the opposition between rural and urban people and a hostile nature, as if she felt threatened by the arrival of these tourists and knew that the dam was soon to come. drown her. In contact with this pitiless nature and the degenerates it shelters, the heroes are quickly returned to their primitive state.
A defining film of the 1970s, Deliverance left its mark on a generation of viewers, as the film was then traded as a “twisted” film from VHS video stores during the 1980s.
Warner Bros.
It was a huge success upon its release, with 46.1 million dollars collected in the United States alone, for an estimated budget of 2 million. In France, it attracted 1.4 million spectators and became cult over the years. He was nominated three times for the 1973 Oscars for Best Picture, Best Editing and Best Direction.
The platforms having a deficit of films dating from before the 80s, Délivrance is unfortunately not yet available by simple subscription. Only AppleTV + currently offers it but for rental. Otherwise, to see it, you have to fall back on physical DVD and Blu-ray media.