User reviews

This French love drama from 1977 shows young Gerard Depardieu ("1492", "Asterix") as an obsessed young accountant who lives in a dream world and falls in love with the woman of his dreams who is not interested in him at all. Driven by his maniac desires he becomes mad and violent against all the people around him and turns to a psycho killer. Depardieu's performance is really good, and there are some surreal scenes like the bloody final of the movie in a public bath where the mad guy tries to celebrate a bizarre wedding ceremony with his despaired love. A well done psycho drama with intense acting, but some boring moments as well.

The movie builds to an inevitably tragic climax, then - more than a little jarringly - director Miller literally rewinds the film back to the penultimate step in the drama, when Depardieu held his lost love with a vision of perfect romantic unity: the moment of fulfillment in which he'll presumably spend the rest of his deranged life. The movie for most of its length is intriguing as an escalating story of obsession, but never really gets a handle on Depardieu's problem, which makes the later developments akin to those you'd find in a Hollywood-type psycho flick, and not that much more restrained. His particular journey is less artistically interesting than the secondary structure of Miou-Miou's obsession with him and the other man's thing for her, which suggests a perpetual domino effect of misplaced ideals and dreams; however, this is never really played out and everything ultimately depends on the central story. When not letting fly, the movie has the restrained observation and visual taste of good middlebrow French movie-making and the overall air of wistful yearning and pain is pretty effective; the setting in the snow is especially striking.

Patricia Highsmith's "that sweet sickness" is an absorbing psychological thriller,which grabs you till its last lines. The movie achieves the dubious feat of jettisoning everything .First of all,Depardieu is anything but a young mysterious romantic psychopath;Miou -Miou is as vulgar as ever.Only the late Dominique Laffin and mainly first-class Claude Pieplu rise to the occasion. So

1.try and see Miller's first effort "la meilleure façon de marcher" 2.do read the book.

I don't agree that this is middle-brow film-making. It's more typical of something on the Lifetime Channel.

I do agree that the movie could have (in other hands) been made intriguing by looking at the chain of obsessions among the characters in the movie - but it fails to do so. This is pretty poor stuff. My main interest was in seeing Depardieu and Miou Miou so much younger than I'm used to seeing them. Even Chamonix looks no more remarkable than any other mountain area. This is really not worth people's time.