Posted in: Movies, News | Tagged: altered innocence, French thriller, giallo, Paul Vecchiali, The Strangler

The Strangler: Rare 1970 French Giallo Gets Premiere US Theatrical Run

The Strangler, a rare French Giallo by the late Paul Vecchiali, has been restored and is now in US arthouse theatres this week.

The Strangler, a rare French Giallo thriller by the late Paul Vecchiali, has been restored from 2K by Altered Innocence and begins a theatrical run in US arthouse theatres this week. The film opened in New York City and expanded to Los Angeles and other cities on November 17th, finally marking its first-ever theatrical release in the United States. A recent selection of The New York Film Festival's Revivals section and Austin's celebrated genre event Fantastic Fest, The Strangler has been earning high praise and buzz, with Slant calling it a "rivetingly stylized meditation on human loneliness," and it's poised to have quite an exciting re-discovery.

An unconventional French giallo released before the subgenre's popularity boom resulting from filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, The Strangler is regarded as Vecchiali's most ambitious work, his first foray into the genre, and a highlight of his overarching filmography. The film centers on Emile (Jacques Perrin from The Young Girls of Rochefort), a handsome young man targeting women he believes are too depressed to go on living. As multiple women fall to Emile's suffocating white scarf, inspector Simon Dangret, the detective assigned to track down the killer, resorts to seriously unorthodox and even unethical methods to get his man with the assistance of Anna, a beautiful woman who believes herself to be a potential victim.

Paul Vecchiali is one of the most fascinating members of the generation of French filmmakers who emerged in the immediate wake of the French New Wave. Hailed as an "icon of a rebellious, reflexive, and emotionally excessive cinema" by Le Monde and celebrated for his prolific filmography and decades-spanning career as a critic, director, and producer, Vecchiali was remarkable both for the often highly stylized, experimental nature of his films and for his pioneering exploration of queer characters and themes.

Releasing work right up until his death earlier this year, he's considered widely influential in France while much of his work has yet to be distributed and appraised with matched acclaim in America — until now, where he's the subject of a series at Metrograph theater in New York focusing on the output of his pioneering production company, Diagonale, which operated with a revolutionary focus on female and queer filmmakers, and now to the first-ever U.S. theatrical release of one of Vecchiali's earliest films, the arthouse psycho-thriller The Strangler (1970).

Initially a selection of the 23rd Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight section, The Strangler equally subverts and indulges in the conventions of the giallo with unexpected beauty and refinement and was praised as a "complex, melancholic meditation on isolation as well as a portrait of collective hysteria" by New York Film Festival this year, where it recently screened in the Revivals section. It's a different flavour from the usual horror and serial killer movies out there.

The schedule and venues for The Strangler can be found here.

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