Stranger in the House

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Audience Member Since I principally regard every Belmondo film worth watching for at least once and the voice-over was done by a personal favourite, I had classified âL'inconnu dans la maison❠as a must-see, even though I was dreading disappointment in every other department (French movies from the early nineties ⦠you've gotta hold your breath). For a moment I thought I was wrong. Unfortunately, this was not the sort of movie in which the pleasant voice-over (possibly with a touch of irony) leads you through the story, giving you the feeling you are really part of it all, but the introductory half hour seemed promising enough. Belmondo can play many different kinds of roles well, including (mostly) comical action heroes, but also â" like in this case â" middle-aged lawyers down on their luck because their wife committed suicide, they have lost their job, and their daughter has refused to speak to them since mother's death, obviously to prove a point. The sorry state of Loursat's (Belmondo's) way-too-big house and his own person plus the frictional relationships with both his daughter and his housekeeper make a nice scene-setting for something interesting yet to come. And the anticipated interesting thing indeed comes when it turns out a murder on some stranger has been committed in Loursat's own house. Great, it's a whodunnit! And based on a story by Georges Simenon, no less. But from then on, we're going downhill. The solving of the mystery is slow, uninspired, full of holes and therefore illogical. Loursat is awoken from his lethargic, depressive state of mind to defend the accused, some vague (boy)friend of his daughter's. There is no clear reason why he would know what's behind all this, and why the accused boy is not guilty. For a man who has just entered a new energetic phase in life, he spends too much time acting like a somnambulist, drinking too much alcohol with old buddies (which was his initial problem anyway). And once it's become clear the daughter's friends are hiding something and that drugs might be involved, he could at least lean on his daughter a bit more and make her talk â" by force, if needs be. If a whodunnit has a denouement one never saw coming, or couldn't even see coming due to lack of clues, for that matter, one often still had the feeling the ending made good sense, and that we should have been able to guess it. In âL'inconnu dans la maisonâ, this is not so. In a way, the ending is not very surprising (we didn't like the guilty person anyway), but at the same time we didn't see it coming (and don't understand how Loursat could have). And frankly, we don't even care. The additional message of this movie might be a warning against drugs (and other intoxicating substances), but this is not really what we were waiting for when we sat down to watch a thrilling court drama. And to add to the disappointment: this lacklustre production has a voice-over that was only allowed to speak one or two short sentences on three occasions (literally â" I counted them). What's the artistic justification of such a device if one underuses it to this preposterous extent? Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/14/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Stranger in the House

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