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The Lady In The Car With Glasses And A Gun – Look! It Moves! By Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Jean-Luc Godard used to say that all you needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. Sooner or later, someone would take him up on that. Frankly, I'm surprised more people haven't.

One overlooked little French movie that opened the week that Star Wars did was this, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, a stylish, low-key neo-noir directed by Joann Sfar, the comic artist who created The Rabbi's Cat and proceeded to direct an animated movie adaptation as well as Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life.

Adapted from a novel by prolific screenwriter and author, the late Sebastien Japrisot, the story takes place over a weekend where a secretary decides on a whim to take her boss' car out to the seaside while he and his wife are out of town. It was supposed to be a little adventure, but she keeps running into people who seemed to recognise her and say she'd been there before when this is the first time she set foot in the town. Or is it? Then she gets attacked in a gas station bathroom and discovers a body in the boot of the car. This leads her to unravel. Is she being set up or is she really a schizophrenic who's forgotten she murdered someone during a psychotic break and is revisiting the scene of the crime?

I first read the novel when I was in college and always thought it would make a fun movie. Turns it there was actually a movie made in 1970 starring Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed, directed by Anatole Litvak. I never saw that movie, and it's been largely forgotten, never released on video or DVD and occasionally turns up on Turner Classics. You can find an extremely naff trailer for it on Youtube that practically gives away the whole movie. That said, Japrisot, the pseudonym for Jean-Baptiste Rossi, wrote many novels with Hitchcockian plots (only without Hitchcock's coldness or cruelty) often featuring a female protagonist of which The Lady in the Car with Glass and a Gun was only one, and nearly all of them have been filmed, including One Deadly Summer, which starred Isabelle Adjani and A Very Long Engagement starring Audrey Tatou.

It's a shame that The Lady in the Car with Glassed and a Gun has been released with so little fanfare and hardly in any cinemas at all. It's not a big, brass high concept film, more a good little crime movie that used to be the bread-and-butter of mainstream mid-tier genre movies that nestled between the blockbusters. It's got style to burn, with Sfar revelling in the late Sixties/early Seventies detail and music and a performance from Scottish star Freya Mavor, who was previously known for being in Channel Four's Skins. The story is mainly a character study about a heroine who's not an eccentric genius or hyper-competent badass but an ordinary person with everyday hang-ups and neuroses subtly informed by her family's traumatic background in World War II. As the story unfolds, her utter ordinariness and basic refusal to do what's expected of her, including falling apart and surrendering, become her superpower and her unpredictability becomes her saving grace. I wouldn't exactly call Japrisot or the story 'feminist', but he clearly enjoyed her quirky company as the novel is entirely spent inside her head, and she's in every scene in the movie. It's not every thriller that has so much sympathy for this kind of character, that gives someone who's blind without her glasses, given to flakiness but means nobody any harm a chance to shine in her own little corner. It's the kind of movie that can become a minor cult if enough people see it.
The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun is now on Video On Demand in the US.

Just driving along at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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