Monsieur Hire 2012 on solarmovie

Monsieur Hire 2012 on solarmovie

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Patrice Leconte‘s “Monsieur Hire” is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a murder, and the opening shot is of a corpse. Monsieur Hire is a scrawny, balding middle-aged tailor who lives by himself. Alice, a 22-year-old blonde beauty with a kind heart, lives by herself in the same apartment building as Hire across the courtyard. On the night of the murder, a slight man was seen by witnesses running toward the building. A police detective discovers in his interviews with Hire's residents that no one likes Hire. Hire is the first to agree. He admits he seems to strike people oddly. As a neighbor from across the hall peeks at him from his doorway, he asks, “Want a photo?” As he walks through his courtyard, white powder is dumped on his impeccable black suit.
Everything about Hire (Michel Blanc) is impeccable; his suit, his tie, the shine on his shoes, the fringe of his hair so neatly trimmed. Alice, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, has a warm smile and a sunny disposition. One night during a thunderstorm a flash of lightning reveals a man watching her from the shadows of the apartment opposite. This is Hire, who watches her day and night, sleeping, waking up, dressing, undressing, ironing her clothes, and having an affair with Emile (Luc Thuillier), her jerk of a boyfriend. When she finds out, what does she do? The screenplay is based on Georges Simenon's Monsieur Hire's Engagement, but it is not like his Inspector Maigret officers; rather, it is more like a traditional novel with carefully observed behavior and details. Similar to Leconte's controlled visual style here, Simenon described the peculiarities of human personality, which he was fascinated by, in elegant, straightforward prose. The film is in color, but Hire’s world is black and white: His suits, shirts, the white mice he keeps in little cage in his tailor shop. His skin is so pale he might never go outside in daytime. On the other hand, Alice enjoys wearing red things like lipstick, her clothes, and the grocery bag of ripe tomatoes that she "drops" on a staircase so that they roll toward Hire as he opens his door. Does he leap to her aid? No, he just stands there and looks at her. What is the purpose of her contrivance?
Another day, she knocks on his door, but he doesn’t answer. Since he never receives visitors and is aware that she has just moved out of her own apartment, he must be aware that it is her. She knocks the next day, and he invites her to visit a restaurant—in a train station, which may be a clue to certain of his thoughts. He eventually confirms that he saw her and her boyfriend kissing. And he witnessed something else that he believes explains her sudden and unexpected friendliness toward him.
So it may, at first. But Alice’s feelings for him grow more complicated, and she is touched by his declaration of love. On the other hand, her boyfriend Emile is a crude physical type whose ideal date would be to ignore her and take her to a boxing match. Later, when he needs to get out of a window quickly, he steps first on her shoulders and then in a cradle made by her hands. Alice learns the secrets of Hire. He tells her that he uses a lot of prostitutes, and as he talks about running a bordello, her face shows fascination, perhaps because Hire has had such erotic experiences and can talk about them so sensually. But he can never visit a prostitute again, he explains, because he has fallen in love with her.
Hire is a man who has a lot of secrets. One night in the course of the police inspector’s investigation, he takes him along to a bowling alley, where he rolls strike after strike flawlessly, even backwards between his legs, even blindfolded, and is applauded by the regulars who have seen this before. After paying the owner, he goes to the bar with the cop, throws back a shot, and says, "You see? I don't get a bad rap everywhere. What’s going on between Hire and Alice? For that matter, what are her feelings for the boyfriend, Emile? He seems to be a clueless small-time criminal who can only be saved by her loyalty, which seems pretty typical for a film noir. We can see that her devotion to him is pointless and undeserved, and even though they do have sex, she is too complicated for that to explain everything. She’s never met a man whose love for her is more profound and devoted (and obsessive) than Hire’s. It would be beyond Emile's comprehension. At the center of this film is great sadness, captured in a late fast-motion shot that slows for an instant to show a detail lingered on in heartbreaking slow motion. Then the ending wraps everything up, but not to everyone’s satisfaction.
Patrice Leconte, born 1947, is one of the most versatile of French directors. You might not be aware that you are a fan of his work because he shifts styles and genres from film to film. His first significant success was 1989's "Monsieur Hire," which I saw premiere at Cannes. He also made "Ridicule," which was about a provincial landowner during the reign of Louis XVI who tries to win over the court by practicing the quick wit that the king loved; "The Widow of Saint-Pierre," which was about a condemned killer who is awaiting death on a French-Canadian island until an executioner can be imported from Paris; "Man on the Train," which was about a suave provincial gentleman's chance encounter with a thief At the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, Leconte stated to me, "I don't think that a filmmaker is manipulating puppets." A filmmaker, on the other hand, is more like a chemist, in my opinion. You see what happens when you mix things that have nothing to do with each other. The starting point for ‘The Man on the Train’ was the meeting of the two actors. Watch what happens when you add a few drops of Jean Rochefort and a few drops of Johnny Hallyday. It sometimes explodes in your face. I asked him an obligatory question about the French New Wave and he said, “Well, I didn’t know Truffaut at all. I never saw him because he probably died too young. One of the things that I loved most about Truffaut was that he loved movies. Additionally, I would like that on my tomb: This man was a movie buff. “