Word: simenon
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MONSIEUR HIRE. In rank solitude, a strange man (Michel Blanc) watches a pretty woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), and someone has murder in mind. From the Georges Simenon novel, French filmmaker Patrice Leconte spins a handsome web of obsession, betrayal and death. Blanc is spookily splendid as the pathetic voyeur...
Story of Women, named best foreign-language film by three critics' groups, is an eloquent example of Simenon cinema -- the kind of movie that, in the manner of Georges Simenon's novels, treats melodramatic subjects with clinical dispassion. Chabrol never coddles viewers; he trusts them to sort out the evidence. His Marie is too complicated to be either a monster or a savior. And Huppert's beautifully deadpan performance finds the ideal emblem for Marie, a vessel empty of everything but human contradictions...
...losers who share a fierce sense of their own integrity. Other notable reprints include Michael Gilbert's Young Petrella (Harper & Row; 222 pages; $15.95), a collection of magazine stories from the 1950s and '60s that display his trademark Scotland Yard detective with a deadpan precision of mood worthy of Simenon, and A Double Life (Little, Brown; 246 pages; $17.95), short gothic chillers by Louisa May Alcott...
...there is far more than humor in this collection. The Fishermen of the Seine evokes, in a style as spare as Maupassant or Simenon, the ponts and iles of Paris at dawn, when rough-clad men hunker in the fog to hook Gallic mysteries like goujon, breme and chevaine. Two hunting pieces extracted from Humphrey's poignant 1977 memoir Farther Off from Heaven call back the hot dust and snaky swamps of his Depression-era boyhood in east Texas, along with the ghost of his hard-drinking, bar-fighting, trick-shot artist of a father...
Perhaps such a man should never have had a daughter. Simenon hints that D. made a sexual advance toward Marie-Jo during the child's eleventh year; when the book was published in France, D. sued successfully to have two passages making this charge explicit suppressed. Whatever the facts of this tangled, pathetic affair, Simenon proudly displays Marie-Jo's incestuous feelings toward him. He danced with her to the strains of the Tennessee Waltz wherever he and his entourage happened to alight. He wrote her passionate letters before she was twelve: "Good night, good night, my tender...