Le cri du hibou

A film described as being "in the Hitchcock tradition" usually means "a cheap imitation", and this French import is no exception. Director Claude Chabrol tries hard to invoke the spirit of the Master by adapting his screenplay from a story by Patricia Highsmith (author of 'Strangers on a Train') about a divorced artist with a fixation about birds (sound familiar?), whose voyeuristic attraction to the unhappily marries Mathilda May leads to a perfectly innocent, platonic friendship between two manic-depressive people. The plot kicks into gear after May's jealous husband disappears; birdman Christophe Malavoy is then accused of foul play, and the film goes to pieces in a hurry, collapsing into a random sampling of routine plot twists before ending in an unfair, inconclusive freeze-frame. It might have been an entertaining whodunit, but unlike his mentor Chabrol takes his scenario far too seriously: you only have to imagine the actors speaking their dialogue in English straight from the subtitles to realize how silly it really is. The film was made in 1987 but until 1991 was never released on this side of the Atlantic, and for good reason.