Word: michell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...young man being hunted for murder. The inspector (Jean Rochefort) doesn't realize it, but he's just hit upon the motive for the puzzling case he is trying to solve. Bernard Descombes, disaffected son of a Lyons clockmaker, has inexplicably killed a right-wing factory informer. His father, Michel (Philippe Noiret), is shaken by the news, but his beefy face betrays hurt and bewilderment rather than outrage. The glib explanations offered by the press and the police don't satisfy him. He knows his son had no strong commitment to leftist politics, and he doubts the dismissal of Bernard...
...Michel is a quiet man who minds his own business and obeys the law--he won't even cross a deserted street against a red light. There is no timidity in him, however; he won't tolerate petty injustice. One of his few outbursts of real anger is provoked by the smashing of his shop windows by two leering thugs, hit men for the dead informer. Michel and his friend Antoine (Jacques Denis) chase the vandals down, beat them and knock them into the river...
...turns out Bernard views his crime as a natural response to a similarly blatant outrage. "I killed him because he was scum" is the only explanation he can offer once he is arrested. In Michel's own experience with the two hoods and his memories of the petty tyranny of his army superiors, he finds a link with his son's disgust and rage. Bernard's crime, he realizes, represents his refusal to succumb to the moral lassitude he sees around...
...shouldn't I?" impasses with the pubescent Veronique. The poor guy obviously has a right to feel lonely; when he crudely but movingly divulges to Ann his haunting memories of first seeing his mother naked, she doesn't even lift the pen from her shopping list. But the actor, Michel Peyrelon, possesses the kind of jowly, hugemouthed face that turns even a wounded smile into a leer, and when he finally holds Veronique's passive head on his shoulder, patting her hair and closing his eyes, his emotional wince seems to say stupidly "God, I'm sensitive...
Anneliese Michel seemed to build her life around an old-fashioned kind of Roman Catholic devotion. In her dormitory room at West Germany's University of Würzburg, the pretty, pious young education student covered her walls with pictures of saints, kept a holy-water font near the door, regularly prayed the Rosary. Timid and intense, she seemed somehow afraid of life; even in her thesis, which she finished this spring, she focused on the phenomenon of fear. Then, one month later, Anneliese died at home in Klingenberg at the age of 23, wasted to skin and bones...