Monsieur Hire

Patrice Leconte’s “Monsieur Hire” is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, spoken of two lonely people who have nothing at all to share, except loneliness. Murder has been committed, and the movie opens on a corpse. Monsieur Hire, a thin, balding middle-aged tailor, lives alone. Alice, on the other hand, is a beautiful, tender-hearted 22-year-old blonde, who, along with Hire, is a loner-living alone across the courtyard from Hire in the same apartment building.

On the night of the murder, a slight man is seen running toward the building by witnesses. A police detective investigates among its residents, learning nobody likes Hire. Hire is the first to agree. He admits he seems to strike people oddly. As a neighbor from across the hall peeks at him from his doorway, he asks, “Want a photo?

” As he passes through his courtyard, white powder falls on his perfect black suit. Everything about Hire (Michel Blanc) is perfect; his suit, his tie, the shine on his shoes, the fringe of his hair so neatly trimmed. Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire) is sunny, open-faced, with a warm smile. One night, in the midst of a thunderstorm, a flash of lightning illuminates the figure in the shadows of the opposite apartment, watching her.

It is Hire, who watches her for hour after hour, night after night: Sleeping, waking up, dressing, undressing, ironing her clothes, making love with her lout of a boyfriend, Emile (Luc Thuillier).

What does she do when she discovers this? The screenplay is based on Monsieur Hire’s Engagement by Georges Simenon, but it’s not at all like one of his Inspector Maigret policiers, much more of a proper novel with well-observed behavior and detail. Simenon was fascinated with anomalies in the human personality that he described in lovely, unadorned prose, not unlike Leconte’s controlled visual style here. The film is colorific, but Hire’s world is black and white: his suits, his shirts, the white mice he keeps in little cage in his tailor shop. His skin is so pale he might never go outside in daytime. Alice, however, likes red: Her clothes, her lipstick, the supermarket bag full of red tomatoes she “drops” on a staircase so they roll toward Hire as he opens his door. Does he jump to help her? No, he simply stands and looks at her.

What is the point of her ruse? Next day, she knocks on his door, but he does not come out. He must know it’s her, because he never has visitors and he must realize she’s just left her own apartment. She knocks the next day, and he invites her to visit a restaurant—in a train station, which may be a clue to certain of his thoughts. Eventually he confirms that, yes, he has seen her and her boyfriend making love.

And he sees something else that he suspects explains her unexpected, sudden warmth toward him. So it may, at first. But Alice’s feelings for him only grow richer and more complicated, and she is touched by his declaration of love. Her boyfriend Emile, on the other hand, is a crass physical type whose ideal date is taking her to a boxing match and ignoring her. Later on, when he needs to run through a window to escape, he steps first in a cradle formed by her hands and then upon her shoulders. Hire shares his secrets with Alice. He goes to whores a lot, he tells her, and as he describes the procedure of a brothel her face reflects fascination, perhaps that a man like Hire could have such erotic experiences and describe them so sensuously.

Hire is a man of many secrets. One night in the course of the police inspector’s investigation he takes him along to a bowling alley, where he rolls strike after strike flawlessly, even backwards between his legs, even blindfolded, and is applauded by the regulars who’ve seen this before. He collects a payment from the owner, joins the cop at the bar, tosses back a shot and says, “You see? I’m not disliked everywhere. What’s the matter between Hire and Alice? For that matter, what does she have going for her boyfriend, Emile? That relationship goes about as standard for a film noir as one gets; he is just as much a witless small-time crook as any number of others populating the genre, and only her loyalty can save him. Her love for him is chaste and thankless as far as we can tell, and though the sex is between them, she’s too complex to be made such a simplistic animal. She has never encountered a man whose passion for her ran deeper, more passionate (and deranged) than Hire’s.

Deep at the core of this Monsieur Hire film is great sadness, and that is captured in a late fast-motion shot slowed for an instant to show something lingered on in heartbreaking slow motion. Then the ending wraps everything up, but not to everyone’s satisfaction. Patrice Leconte was born in 1947. He is one of the most versatile French directors. He changes styles and genres from film to film, so you may be a fan of his without ever realizing that. “Monsieur Hire” was his first success in Cannes, where I saw it, 1989.

He also directed “Ridicule” (1996), about a provincial landowner during the reign of Louis XVI, who seeks to win the favor of the court by practicing the quick wit much loved by the king; “The Widow of Saint-Pierre” (2000), about a condemned killer awaiting death on a French-Canadian island until an executioner can be imported from Paris; “Man on the Train ” with Jean Rochefortand Johnny Hallyday as a suave provincial gentleman’s chance encounter with a thief; and another of my Great Movies, “The Hairdresser’s Husband” (1990), again starring Rochefort as a man so enraptured by a small town hairdresser that he marries her, buys her a beauty parlor, and requires only that he be allowed to sit in it, day after day, adoring her. “I don’t think that a filmmaker is manipulating puppets,” Leconte told me at the 2002 Monsieur Hire Toronto Film Festival. “On the contrary, I believe a filmmaker is more like a chemist. You mix elements that have nothing to do with each other and you see what will happen. The starting point for ‘The Man on the Train’ was the meeting of the two actors.”. A few drops of Johnny Hallyday, a few drops of Jean Rochefort and look what happens.

I asked him the obligatory question about the French New Wave and he said, “Well, I didn’t know Truffaut at all. I never met him, because he died too early probably. One of the things that I loved most about Truffaut was that he loved movies. And I would like that on my tomb: This man loved to make movies. “

Watch free movies like The Return on Fmovies