The Blue Villa
| Un buit qui rend fou | |
|---|---|
| File:X-unbruitquirendfou95-jjv.jpg | |
| Directed by | Alain Robbe-Grillet Dimitri de Clercq |
| Written by | Alain Robbe-Grillet Dimitri de Clercq |
| Produced by | Jaques de Clercq Domenique Fobe Gerard Ruey Jerome Paillard>Stephen Beckner Jaqueline Pierreux |
| Starring | Fred Ward Arielle Dombasle Sandrine Le Berre Charles Tordjman Dimitris Poulikakos Michalis Maniatis Christian Maillet |
| Distributed by | Nomad Films |
Release dates | February 17, 1995 (Berlin International Film Festival) |
Running time | 100 min. |
| Language | French |
| Budget | 2,700,000 BEF (= 600,000 $) |
Un bruit qui rend fou (English: The Blue Villa) is a 1995 crime thriller film with Fred Ward.
Story
The complexly interwoven lives of the residents of an isolated Greek island form the basis of this psycho-sexual drama from iconoclastic film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet. Living on the island are a few native Greeks, several Chinese, who spend their days playing mah-jongg, Nordmann, a boozy screenwriter, and seductive Sarah la-Blonde, the madam at the Blue Villa, the town whorehouse, in which Sarah hides Santa, alias Lotus Blossom. Sarah is teaching Santa to sing an aria from Wagner. One day, Frank, who could be a ghost, arrives on the island. At first he never speaks and appears to be looking for something or someone. It is later learned that he was involved in the supposed death of Santa, who just might be Nordmann's daughter. It is up to the local police chief, Thieu, to figure out what parts of the story are true and what parts are fiction.
Other version of the story
Perhaps the French title - Un bruit qui rend fou (a maddening noise) - evokes more accurately the particular qualities of Robbe-Grillet's movie. As in Last Year at Marienbad and L'Immortelle, the writer/director can't simply let a story unfold, but worries away at it with question after question, hypothesis after hypothesis. Thus, when a Mediterranean island is revisited by Frank (Ward), a sailor said to have drowned a year earlier when he fled after allegedly killing 16-year-old Santa, we're unsure not only whether he's a ghost, but whether the girl is actually dead or hidden in a bordello, the Blue Villa, run by a shady chanteuse (Dombasle). We're unsure even whether Frank's return is for real, or something imagined by Santa's father, a screenwriter (Tordjman), whom, naturally, the police chief suspects of being behind the crime, if it ever happened. Despite the longueurs, fans of Ruiz, Greenaway or Welles' Confidential Report may find much to enjoy. Nevertheless, just as the whiff of sexual perversity now seems both dubious and dated, so the film's arch artifice seems strangely out of touch with current film-making concerns.
Cast
- Arielle Dombasle
- Fred Ward
- Charles Tordjman
- Sandrine Le Berre
- Dimitris Pouikakos
- Muriel Jacobs
- Michael Maniatis
- Christian Maillet
- Li Lai
- Bob Wade
- Roger Green
- Laurence Tremolet