The Blue Villa
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Blue Villa (1994), also known as Un bruit qui rend fou is a French language film by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Dimitri de Clercq starring Fred Ward and Arielle Dombasle.
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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
Main Cast
- Fred Ward
- Arielle Dombasle
- Charles Tordjman
- Sandrine Le Berre
- Dimitris Poulikakos
- Christian Maillet
- Muriel Jacobs
- Michael Maniatis
Courtesans, Clients,...
