DIRECTOR
Jeremiah Chechik
SCREENWRITER
Don
Roos
based
on a screenplay by
Henri-Georges
Clouzot
and
the novel Celle Qui N'Etait Plus by
Pierre
Boileau
Thomas Narcejac
PRODUCERS
James G. Robinson
Marvin Worth
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter James
MUSIC
Randy Edelman
EDITOR
Carol Littleton
CAST
Sharon Stone (Nicole Horner)
Isabelle Adjani (Mia Baran)
Chazz Palminteri (Guy Baran)
Kathy Bates (Shirley Voguel)
Spalding Gray (Simon Veatch)
Shirley Knight (Edie Danziger)
Allen Garfield (Leo Katzman)
Adam Hann-Byrd (Erik)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 107m
U.S. release: March 22, 1996
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Jeremiah
Chechik movies
reviewed on this website:
- The Avengers
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Diabolique is a great chiller that ranks with
the best of Hitchcock. It draws you into its web of guilt and
complicity, and it takes a long time to shake off. Now for the
bad news: The Diabolique I'm talking about is the 1955
French thriller by the ingenious director Henri-Georges Clouzot,
a quiet master of the form. The new remake bearing that title
might as well be called Plastique. Director Jeremiah Chechik
apparently got the job because of the flair for the macabre he
showed in his previous work -- National Lampoon's Christmas
Vacation and Benny and Joon. Diabolique is
another example of American non-entities being allowed to remake
French classics (The Birdcage is an exception). To be
fair, Chechik does try to make the movie look and feel European,
and he and writer Don Roos (Single White Female) preserve
Clouzot's plot twists (while adding some lame new ones).
But if you've seen the original -- well, it's like watching a
remake of Psycho* and waiting
to see whether the new filmmakers will screw up the shower scene.
Both versions of Diabolique hinge on a bathroom shock
comparable to the one Janet Leigh got. In 1955, nobody saw it
coming. In 1996, you've likely seen it imitated (if not duplicated)
dozens of times even if you missed the original. Does Chechik
screw it up? Not really, but he doesn't improve on it, either
-- so why do it?
The story remains the same, though transplanting it from France
to Pittsburgh seems pointless. (Maybe Chechik hoped some Night
of the Living Dead vibes would rub off on him.) What we have
now is just a movie about a jerk (Chazz Palminteri) and the two
women -- his sickly wife (Isabelle Adjani) and his former mistress
(Sharon Stone) -- who conspire to murder him and are taunted
with hints that they botched the murder. The key phrase there
is "just a movie"; Clouzot's film didn't feel like
just a movie. He wasn't a droll trickster like Hitchcock: he
grabbed you with cold hands and never let go, right up until
that unforgettable final line, "I saw her. I know I saw
her."
The new Diabolique mostly dispenses with subtlety, contenting
itself with regularly scheduled cathartic jolts that pass for
suspense in our degraded culture. Clouzot staged the bathroom
scene with a nightmarish detachment, whereas Chechik's version
is more like Night of the Living Dead Guy in the Tub.
The actors are dead, too. We know Stone can play a cast-iron
conniver, Palminteri a lout, and Adjani a vulnerable waif. They
go through the motions here, and halfway through Diabolique
I started thinking how much more intriguing it might have been
if Stone's and Adjani's roles were reversed. As a rule, when
you sit there mentally recasting a movie for lack of anything
else to chew on, the movie is in trouble.
One welcome addition is a female detective, played by Kathy Bates
apparently after she watched a Columbo marathon (Columbo,
by the way, was inspired by the detective in the 1955 version);
she wears a cruddy coat and actually says "Oh, one more
thing..." Bates' no-nonsense performance rides right over
the insipid climax, in which Sharon Stone gets funky with a rake.
Clouzot made you share the guilt of murderesses; Chechik makes
you ponder the horrors of yard equipment. C'est Hollywood.
* This review was written, of course,
a couple years before the actual remake
of Psycho. And yes, they did screw up the shower scene.
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