Le Combat Dans L’île

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Movie Details

• Genre: Drama
• Release Date: 2009-11-06
• Running Time: 104 min.
• Director: Alain Cavalier
• Cast: Romy Schneider, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Henri Serre, Diane Lepvrier, Robert Bousquet, Jacques Berlioz, Armand Meffre, Maurice Garrel, Marcel Cuvelier, Pierre Asso
• Producer:
• Writer: Alain Cavalier, Jean-Paul Rappeneau
• Distributor: Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF)
• Official Site: Le Combat Dans L’île Official Site

Alain Cavalier’s 1962 Le Combat Dans L’île isn’t a lost masterpiece—it’s too unstable for that—but it’s fascinatingly nervy. Right-wing militant Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) broods around the house, concerned that wife Anne (Romy Schneider) is acting like a slut. Clément’s a man of contradictions; when the negotiations he’s conducting on behalf of workers at his father’s factory break down, Clément grabs his bazooka and heads out to assassinate a politician. As that token summary implies, Combat isn’t overly concerned with coherence or a smooth arc. Instead, it’s a dizzying array of dialectics: Anne’s discovery of the bazooka against the background of her maid singing Offenbach is the neatest (and least extreme) reduction of revolutionary vs. counterrevolutionary dynamics here. Pierre Lhomme’s scintillating, jagged black-and-white cinematography is ahead of its time, and the film’s unexpectedly bifurcated structure sends Trintignant into the ether for almost the entire back half. There’s a surprise every five minutes, except when fascism gets its ass kicked at the end.