In recent years, French cinema seems to have reconnected with the mainstream audience. For too long sustained by lucrative tax breaks, the majority of films were, to be blunt, unwatchable; for a period virtually every French release seemed to involve a neurotic middle class couple arguing with each other… for 90 goddamned minutes. The first clues of a transformation came with the hugely successful Amelie, a charming, quirky and accessible film which nevertheless had it’s detractors (too populist, not French enough, not enough angst). Since then, we’ve had the likes of Harry He’s Here to Help, L’homme du train, Lemming, Hidden, which have merged the arthouse and the generic to good effect, and Calvaire, The Nest, Sheitan etc, effective, unpretentious B-Movies.
Malefique was a 2002 production, which only saw the light of day in the UK a couple of years later with its release on the FrightFest label. The story owes a little to The Evil Dead, a little to Prison and a little to Hellraiser. Four convicts – white collar criminal Carrere (Gérald Laroche), Lasselle (Philippe Laudenbach), a professor who murdered his wife, thuggish transvestite Marcus (Clovis Cornillac) and a demented idiot called Daisy (Dimitri Rataud) – share a cell together. While whiling away the endless days, Carrere discovers an old notebook hidden behind the wall by his bunk; it turns out to be the journal of Charles Danvers, an occultist who had been imprisoned in the same cell in the early 1900s. What’s more, it contains details about his experiments in ‘walking through walls’, experiements which would appear to have ended succesfully given his eventual disappearence / escape from the jail. As each of their situations grows increasingly desperate , the four men decide to recreate his work and make a break for it… but unfortunately the magic the journal contains isn’t as benevolent as it seems.
Given it’s restricted location – the whole film is shot inside the cell (albeit with a breif excursion back into the past) – and limited characters, one of Malefique‘s great successes is managing to avoid being overly theatrical. Director Eric Valette deserves some plaudits for keeping the pace moving and also throwing in some creepy incidentals, most particularly Carrere’s mysteriously mutilated action man doll, which seems to watch over events with a sinister significance. At the same time, though, things don’t become too gimmicky; there are effects, but they aren’t allowed to overwhelm the script which, though containing some ludicrous elements – would they really lock up an embezzler in the same cell as a pair of semi-psycopathic murderers? And I always thought France was civilised – is taut and different enough to maintain the interest.
It’s also surprisingly well acted, given it’s obviously low budget. Character actor Gérald Laroche has been popping up in French films since the early nineties, generally in secondary roles, and is extremely effective as the most defined of the quartet (he’s also in The Serpent, which had a decent international release). Philippe Laudenbach, possibly the most French looking man to have ever lived, has been around for even longer, primarily on TV, although he has had blink and you’ll miss him parts in the likes of Betty Blue. Clovis Cornillac was also in The Serpent, but is best known for playing Asterix in Asterix at the Olympic Games.
Given the skill with which he assembled this, it’s hardly suprising that Eric Valette has gone on to bigger things. His next film was the flawed One Missed Call, a remake of the Japanese Chakushin Ari, with Edward Burns and Shannyn Sossamon, and he’s just finishing Hybrid, which will be released in 2009. It’s just a shame that he had to move to the US to further his career…