Two Simenon adaptations (Patreon)

Panique (1946, Julien Duvivier): 63

Monsieur Hire (1989, Patrice Leconte): 67

Started watching Panique, which I'd never seen, with zero foreknowledge, and quickly realized that it must be an adaptation of the same Georges Simenon novel that inspired Monsieur Hire. (Michel Simon playing a character named Monsieur Hire was my first clue.) Leconte's film had landed somewhere on the bottom half of my original, contemporaneous 1990 top 10 list, but didn't survive when I revised all my lists by year-of-premiere—partly because 1989 is a bloodbath, but also because I hadn't seen Monsieur Hire since shortly after its U.S. theatrical release and didn't remember it very well. Since it's available via Kanopy, a revisit seemed in order, and now I'm struggling to think of two other movies based on the same source material that are so starkly different. Maybe The Big Clock and No Way Out? Feel free to suggest other candidates.

Anyway, both films are quite good, despite having only the barest bones of the novel's plot in common. Panique starts out noir-ish but eventually becomes a portrait of mob psychology (and implicit anti-Semitism); that aspect is completely absent from Monsieur Hire, and doesn't appear to have originated with Simenon, either. Hire, the novel's protagonist, plays a supporting role in this version of the story, and that gruff teddy bear Simon makes the character largely sympathetic even in his alienation. Duvivier instead shifts the emphasis to the two young lovers and their machinations, with Viviane Romance (quel nom!) as a classic femme fatale who plays Hire for a chump. This approach neuters most of the scenario's inherent kinkiness and perversity (which probably couldn't have survived onscreen back then, even in France), but creates a deeply disturbing dynamic in which the villains exploit an entire town's willingness to believe the worst of someone they dislike for no very good reason. Both films end with Hire desperately fleeing over rooftops, but only in Panique does it genuinely feel as if he's being hunted. (Indeed, this film winds up closely resembling Vinterberg's The Hunt.) And while the reveal of Hire's evidence is a bit cute in its posthumous irony, ending on the shot of Alice and her beau circling the rollercoaster's track, ignorant of their fate, is an inspired touch. Solid stuff.

Monsieur Hire is another animal entirely: an offbeat character study of a misanthropic voyeur, monomaniacally repetitive (the same Michael Nyman cue gets played approximately three zillion times, in concert with certain setups) and temperamentally frigid. Michel Blanc makes Hire self-consciously weird, nobody's idea of a victim; Leconte keeps him front and center, repeatedly finding ways to underline his solipsism. There's something ineffably discomfiting, for example, about a man who gets hit by a snowball thrown from above and doesn't even bother looking up to see who threw it. For a while, it seems as if Sandrine Bonnaire's more ambiguous interpretation of Alice might rival Blanc's Hire for oddity—with the details of the crime (and thus Alice's motivation) withheld here until mid-film, their relationship echoes the apartment-window power plays of Dekalog, Six/A Short Film About Love (which I didn't first see until six years later—otherwise I might have been less initially impressed by this one). When Hire starts waxing openly romantic, despite knowing (unlike Panique's incarnation) that Alice is using him, the film slides into conventionality, concluding on a comparatively flat note. For the first 30 or 40 minutes, though, I remembered exactly why I'd once loved it. No sweeping assessment of society's ills, however acute, will rattle me like a blurry X-ray of a single fucked-up human being.