Monsieur Hire
by Patrice Leconte
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Actor: Andr? Wilms, Eric B?renger, Luc Thuillier, Michel Blanc, Sandrine BonnaireDirector: Patrice Leconte
Cinematographer: Denis Lenoir
Writer: Patrice Leconte
Editor: Jo?lle Hache
Producer: Philippe Carcassonne
Producer: Ren? Cleitman
Writer: Georges Simenon
Writer: Patrick Dewolf
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC, Original recording reissued
Running Time: 81 minutes
Release Date: 1999-12-14
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
VHS Movie Reviews of Monsieur Hire
Movie Review: A Timeless Psychological Thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently found a copy of Georges Simenon's 1933 "The Engagement" on the remainder table at a local bookstore. Simenon was an extraordinarily successful writer and this work is one of his very best. The novel is a psychological thriller with outward description giving the reader's imagination just enough to build an apprehension of what seems tragically inescapable. The movie follows the novel closely, not only in characterization and plot but in the setting as well. Life the novelist, we become aware of and sympathic to the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the Monsieur Hire's life. Visual clues draw the viewer into being a knowing partner in the story, a story that could be yours or mine given the randomness of events that set our apprehension in motion. As with the novel, the movie has comparatively little dialogue leaving the flow of visual events to engage us. An excellent modern, indeed timeless, movie.Movie Review: the fine line between love and obsession...
Summary: 5 Stars
MONSIEUR HIRE is a small masterpiece of a thriller that has stood the passage of time very well. By allowing the characters to reveal themselves with subtlety and patience, and stressing their struggles (inner and outer) and their attempts to live with and liberate themselves from these struggles, rather than relying on setting and artifice, Patrice Leconte has removed the stifling effects of chronological and spatial imprisonment that mar so many otherwise well-made films. It has a contemporary feel, but the foundations of the story and the humans who populate it could easily be transplanted into any era - love, loneliness, the suspicion of anything / anyone different, guilt, and erotic obsession are all present here, manipulating, infecting and challenging their mortal carriers, driving them to consequences none of them could foresee.
Leconte wrote his script based on a 1933 Georges Simenon novel, filmed as PANIQUE in 1947 by Julien Duvivier. Rather than attempting a `remake' of Duvivier's film, he explains that his intention was to create `a new adaptation...a more personal work, expressing my own ideas...to express something that's very interesting to me, and troubling, which is erotic desire.'
The film opens with a scene that presages the voyeuristic aspects that will be developed more fully later on - the pale body of a young woman lies on the ground, almost in an attitude of peaceful sleep; a man - revealed as a police detective - looks down on her. We next see him sitting in her apartment, and hear his thoughts in a voiceover: `Pierrette died on her 22nd birthday. That's no age to die, people say...as though there were a right age.' He goes through her things, a type of post-mortem voyeurism in itself, and muses that `...no one will hold her in their arms again...', giving voice to the importance of touch, which will be repeated throughout the film.
Monsieur Hire is a lonely man in the deepest, most painful and desperate sense. Utterly alone, he occupies a small, neat, apartment. He is self-employed as a tailor, a solitary pursuit. His neighbours revile and distrust him - the children in his building make him the target of their taunts. Yet our first glimpse of him shows him extending kindness to one of them, his hand on the head of a little girl, gently directing her gaze toward a doorway, having her count to 30, in an attempt to rid her of a headache, or perhaps a fear, by distracting her. When she finishes counting, he removes his hand, comfortingly saying, `See...? All gone now.' He then walks away, headed to work. She looks after him with a gaze that is so unaffectedly childlike that it could not possibly be coaxed from a performer, a mixture of gratitude and unease - the man who has been the butt of so many pranks has shown her a moment of honest compassion.
His aching solitude finds an outlet in his furtive viewing of Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire), a beautiful young woman who lives in the building across the way. Rarely closing her curtains, she goes about her life unaware of his attention. She casually dresses and undresses, bathes, does her chores, and conducts a love affair with her fianc? Emile, all under Hire's steady gaze. It is only by a chance flash of lightning one night that she sees him in his window and realises she is being watched. Shocked and frightened at first, she becomes fascinated with this voyeuristic stranger, and sets up a situation through which the two of them meet face to face.
The detective investigating the murder turns his attentions early to Hire, his instincts aroused by the fact that the man is a loner, neither liked nor trusted by those who live around him. Hire discovers that he's under suspicion - the detective mentions the murder and the fact that a cab driver saw a man in a dark overcoat running toward Hire's apartment building. The tailor shows no emotion, then gets in a jab of his own - `It can't be easy to still be just a detective at your age.' The detective continues to question Hire frequently, both at the shop and apartment, sometimes brutally hounding and embarrassing him.
The friendship that grows between Alice and her voyeur is a strange one - her feelings of shock and danger seem to disappear rather quickly, and she admits enjoying being watched. The love that Hire has felt for her for some time grows even stronger - and while initially he attempts to remain emotionally aloof, he begins to let his feelings for her become known, a little at a time.
Her fianc? is apparently engaged in some sort of activity that has caused him to be under the gaze of the police...yet another type of voyeurism. The tension he feels under this scrutiny begins to cause emotional cracks to appear. As their relationship becomes less satisfying and more unpromising, Alice appears to rely more on Hire emotionally. He finds himself beginning to believe that the two of them might share a future together as the film comes to its climax.
More than simply presenting the story itself, the film invites the viewer to contemplate the fine line between love and obsession. Hire's voyeurism of Alice, while inarguably disturbing, is pursued by him with a pure heart and an almost meditative calmness. He is never seen stooping to physical self-gratification in relation to his voyeurism. This is an extremely complex character - the skill with which Michel Blanc fleshes out his part is immense. Sandrine Bonnaire, who has given many standout performances in her career (including her portrayal of the young vagrant in Agn?s Varda's 1985 masterpiece VAGABOND) is absolutely perfect. Patrice Leconte has brought forth something very special in Monsieur Hire - a finely-crafted, intelligently written and well-acted thriller, to be sure...but a treasure of much deeper proportions that will reveal more and inspire more thought and contemplation with repeated viewings, even after the ending is known to an open-minded and appreciative audience.
Movie Review: "All I do is look"
Summary: 4 Stars
It's been said that film, by its very nature, is a voyeuristic experience. We are, after all, not within the action itself; we're viewers who derive entertainment from the misery on screen, much like that of Schadenfreude. In "Monsieur Hire," we are, in a sense, voyeurs to a voyeur. As sexually-charged as the word may be, it is not sex that's at the forefront here, but rather the themes of aching loneliness and love, specifically the extent to which a person will go to assuage an emptiness that burrows deeply, as well as the injustices and alienation suffered by those who are merely different.
Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) is a loner who's hated by his neighbors and a constant target of pranks. An oddity who's avoided and gossiped about, he says only that the loathing stems from his refusal to socialize. (His full surname is Hirovitch. Could his being Jewish perhaps be the reason for the animosity? I don't know; I'm just guessing.) As reprieve from the dull routines of his tailoring business and the torment of his neighbors, M. Hire takes to watching a beautiful young woman in a flat across his. His nightly vigil consists of stoically watching her in the dark, fascinated by every movement she makes. It soon becomes clear that he's not motivated by perversion or prurience, but adoration that evolves into love.
Her name is Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire) and she accidentally discovers what M. Hire has been doing. Instead of reporting him to the police, she cultivates a relationship with him, and we are led to believe that Alice shares M. Hire's affections. But Alice is in love with a boyfriend who treats her shabbily and refuses to commit. When a murdered woman's body is discovered in the woods, M. Hire's neighbors single him out as the likely murderer despite the absence of evidence and motive. How his love for Alice is tested and how it ties in with the murder are best left unmentioned. Suffice to say that there's a clever twist to this story that takes one by surprise.
Based on a story by Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (creator of the Inspector Maigret series), "Monsieur Hire" is an understated and somber film that consistently refuses to provide easy answers. Instead, the viewer is forced to intuit, from one scene to the next, the feelings and motivations of its protagonists. The mystery or the whodunit seems only incidental to the narrative. I admire the film's artistry, from carefully set up shots that actually replace dialogue (in my opinion, much harder to achieve) to the smart script that slowly builds the story, luring me toward a startling end. However, despite the careful attention, I'm not sure I fully understood M. Hire and Alice to the degree I was meant to. Even now, as I'm recalling certain scenes, I'm not confident that I've interpreted them as they were intended and cannot determine if this was due to a failure on my part or the film's overall ambiguity. I'm straddling these two possibilities and giving it four stars.
(Language: French with English subtitles)
Movie Review: Finally on DVD
Summary: 4 Stars
This is one of those great but little seen foreign films that I managed to catch on Laserdisc probably 15 years ago. Great that it's now out on DVD. Strange, different story, told well..good transfer, okay audio.
Movie Review: Men who love to much...Ouchh
Summary: 5 Stars
Men who love to much...Ouchh!!
Monsieur Hire (1989-Dir Patrice Laconte).
It has been mentioned that Patrice Laconte is the best example of a non-stereotyped cinema in France,(What has been colled "Cinema de Auteur") Paradoxically a citizen in the Country in which such artistic category was born. But I complete disagree with that. Man and feelings in all the small and soft variation those are the main issue of Patrice Laconte films.
How is to be a man in our western societies? Tha is his main quesion to be answered along his movies. Of course as a man himself there is always a bias, but that is also part of the game.
The long waiting DVD of "Monsieur Hire", is now out at the end of 2007, is almost a Christmas gift for the followers of Patrice Laconte's cinema. Monsieur Laconte is a man that lives like a shadow, he wants to be not detected, and because that he is hated. He is follow by a detective because in a case murder of a young women around the area, Monsieur Hire is the number one as the suspect list. The people around which he interact barely when it does also think that he was the murder and attacked him. He is a tailor, of Jewish origin (His grandfather and father were changed the name of Horrowitz to Hire). That also could imply another motive for to be an out-side like, why he is afraid of the surrounded and never respond to the object that people through him (Anti-Semitism in Frances in well-known in small towns).
He use to attend with local prostitutes but suddenly he found that he did not want to do that any more, he didn't want to be with a women in that conditions. He already noticed that a beautiful woman lives across his wndow, Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire), of which is love plat?nicamente, as any person timid. But, he is not foolish and sees more, however, the idealization by "love", and by his beloved, it becomes the moral standard. That is what use to happen in early romance poems of French Provence in which to fall in love, out of marriage, with another person was an institution just because LOVE (As a mythological god). Alice notice that M.Hire is looking at her, and she start to play the old game of "female cat and male mouse"
It is then that we find another topic in common in Patrice Laconte films: "Love" as feeling that catalyses what we are already, nothing more than that, by fortune! This occurs, even in the movie "Man on the train" (2002), where two men the poet and the gangster, feel love and nostalgia for the lives of each one. The poet (Jean Rochefort) by being a robber, and the thief (Johnny Hollyday), to live in a bourgeois home yhat closeness a museum museum.
Monsieur Hire is a further proof that love not enough in people relationships, that one-sided love complicates (there is one of Alice with his boyfriend about such issue: " ...If you love me a little, if one loves a lot that is enough").
Because M. Hire is a sincere, loving, sentimental, and with a house of his own in Switzerland that he puts on his woman feet. So it seem the outcome in many ways of human kin evolution, about the characteristics of man, humanized by women, that is not always value by some women, blinded by another man ("The real love" of course).
M. Hire is afraid of love, she loves to another guy, which is a lost case, and with which may not have a future, but she plays the chess pieces on the board. Finally we found that women in love are blindfold.
Rafael J. Salin-Pascual
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