Don't let the current rating fool you! "la fille des collines " is a movie with big ambitions , which purpose is to depict a wild passion, shared by two brothers,who constantly tear each other part for "the girl from the hills "(check the title),a little savage called Angelina ."Wuthering heights",it is not.
The beginning will remind the cine buff of Marcel Pagnol and his masterpiece "Manon Des sources" (1952): the father who keeps his daughter at home to marry her later to a good man ; filming on location in the splendid landscapes of the Pyrénées can delude for a while....
But the film falls short of its goal ,by a long shot ; the characters ,in spite of good cast ,are cardboard: the vicious wealthy brother,Vincent, a married man who plays around and squanders the late father's fortune with his degenerate ways ; the sacrified one, Tom,back from the dirty Algeria war, who falls for Angelina, whose father cannot prevent her from sleeping with Vincent. When he discovers the affair ,the father goes mad and wants to kill the bad guy ; to save him, Tom says to daddy he's Angelina's real lover and he is going to marry her. Which he does .But Angelina does not love him and tells him so ; still the brother covets the bride.
Based on an American novel by Charles Williams "hot girl" , the screenwriters substitute harlequin romance for burning passion ;the excellent Tcheky Karyo is given a preposterous part and fails totally to convince ; a lot of female nudity is not enough to describe a hot passion, even on the back seat of a car ,a trick as old as the hills ...
Robin Davis had a huge blockbuster with his adaptation of William Irish 's "I married a dead man"
("j'ai épousé une ombre") ,but ,in my book, he never recreated the writer's desperate atmosphere (let alone its ending) ; the following works ("hors-la-loi" and this one) are pretentious boring works.
