Highest honors go to this stylish, cinematically refined adaptation of a George Simenon thriller. Michel Blanc becomes a person of interest for a murder investigation mainly because he’s disliked and anti-social; Sandrine Bonnaire is the neighbor that he peeps at nightly, to stir his secret passion. Director Patrice Leconte directs with almost perfect control, turning the show into an emotional workout.

Monsieur Hire
Blu-ray
Cohen Film Collection
1989 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 79 min. / Street Date October 25, 2022 / Available from / 29.95
Starring: Michel Blanc, Sandrine Bonnaire, Luc Thuillier, André Wilms, Eric Bérenger, Marielle Berthon, Philippe Dormoy, Marie Gaydu, Michel Morano, Nora Noël.
Cinematography: Denis Lenoir
Production Designer: Ivan Maussion
Costume designer: Elisabeth Tavernier
Film Editor: Joëlle Hache
Original Music: Michael Nyman
Scenario, adaptation and dialogue by Patrice Leconte, Patrick Dewolf from the book Les fiançailles de M. Hire by Georges Simenon
Produced by Philippe Carcassonne, René Cleitman
Directed by Patrice Leconte

We’re fond of complaining that remakes too often happen to the wrong movies. Shows that were near perfect to begin with (The Day of the Jackal, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) are given unnecessary, lackluster remakes while promising efforts that didn’t turn out perfectly are forever forgotten.

Although too many remakes just capitalize on a well-known title, there are happy exceptions. A prime example of a film remade for the right reason is 1989’s Monsieur Hire. In his new interview, the energetic director Patrice Leconte says it came about because of his desire to remake a moody 1946 murder thriller by Julien Duvivier, Panique. That doesn’t sound like a good idea at all — the B&W classic belongs to its sad immediate postwar setting, which frames a story of bigotry and cruel entrapment. Its unhappy leading character is strongly identified with the star Michel Simon — a straight remake would only invite unwanted comparisons. Who remembers the TV series remade from the classic Casablanca?  Could Charles McGraw or David Soul ever have escaped the shadow thrown by Humphrey Bogart?

Director Leconte was persuaded not to remake the 1946 movie, but to source the original Georges Simenon book Les fiançailles de M. Hire, written in 1933. Julien Duvivier and Charles Spaak’s adaptation emphasized some aspects and downplayed others. Instead of mirroring their version, Leconte reinterprets the material for an emotionally colder time.

Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc of The Tenant) lives a lonely, isolated existence.  He works as a tailor and is always neat and clean. His neighbors shun him and children mock him just for being different; he admits that he’s not outgoing or friendly. He makes joyless visits to a brothel.  Cut off from personal connections, Hire discovers love, or a kind of love, by observing a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) he sees every night through his window, in the building next door. Her name is Alice. He also watches her with her lover as well (Luc Thuillier).

A detective (André Wilms) suspects Monsieur Hire as a person of interest in the murder of a teenage girl found strangled in a vacant lot. Convinced that Hire’s closed-off attitude is evidence of guilt, the detective repeatedly harasses him. But the dour tailor doesn’t slip up. Neither does he tell the detective what he’s seen happening next door: he thinks he knows the identity of the murderer, but doesn’t want to implicate his ‘dream woman’ Alice in the crime.

Things become complicated when Alice discovers that Hire has been watching her. Surprisingly, she initiates a friendship with her admirer.  She says that she likes to be watched. In no hurry to let down his emotional defenses, Monsieur Hire ignores her first two attempts to meet him. When he does respond, we worry that Alice may be acting on an ulterior motive.

Monsieur Hire immediately distinguishes itself from the ’46 Panique. Leconte and co-screenwriter Patrick Dewolf give the movie a cool and dispassionate surface to match Hire’s unemotional behavior. The neighbors in the older movie openly criticized Hire and conspired behind his back. Duvivier emphasized the anti-Semitism in the Simenon novel, making Hire as much a victim of bigotry as anything else. Patrice Leconte’s reworking sees Monsieur Hire’s interior turmoil only from the outside. Other than externalizing his anguish with a prostitute, Hire remains closed off, a mystery to all. When Alice reacts to Hire’s Peeping Tom behavior by attempting to draw him out, we don’t know what to think. Is Alice responding to some inner compulsion of her own?  Can she really be the answer to his loneliness?

What with the voyeurism theme and the wordless sequences in which the camera observes this sad man, Monsieur Hire is often described as a Hitchcockian cross between Rear Window and a hardboiled James M. Cain- type thriller. The voyeurism setup is more than credible, with the two apartments separated just enough that Alice might not initially realize she’s putting on a show for her neighbor.

But director Leconte’s emphasis is intimate character observation, not cinematic experimentation. We aren’t invited to join in a director’s voyeuristic game, and instead look for the truth in Hire’s melancholy eyes. The camera doesn’t rush in to judge his every action. In an early scene Hire interacts with a little girl on the street. He later gives a pet mouse a burial in the river.  A suspicious observer might think him a latter-day Peter Lorre, harboring secrets of terrible crimes.

Like Michel Simon, the balding actor Michel Blanc isn’t conventionally handsome. This makes Monsieur Hire all the more puzzled when Ms. Bonnaire’s breezy young Alice develops a keen interest in him. Bonnaire started out just six years before in Maurice Pialat’s Á nos amours . . . at age sixteen in a highly sexualized role. Monsieur Hire doesn’t stick 100% to Hire’s personal experience, as we see Alice and her boyfriend Emile on their own, making flaky, non-committal plans to marry.

The show begins with images of a murder victim, but it is not a procedural. The detective probes and stresses Hire looking for signs of guilt, as when he confronts him with a bloody scarf left at the crime scene. But the always-serious tailor never takes the bait.

Monsieur Hire is made from the same source as Panique yet makes an entirely different impression. Instead of Duvivier’s expressionist lighting and dynamic cutting, it uses color and the clean wide screen of Panavision to produce cool, unforced images. The suspense is all in character. Georges Simenon’s original plot coincidences are there, linked to a character study that slots Monsieur Hire somewhere on the voyeurism scale between Hitchcock’s Jeff Jeffries and Michael Powell’s Mark Lewis. Hire is a highly romantic character. He’s not blinded to the possibility of being used as a patsy — his love is so complete that it transcends such paltry distinctions.

Leconte’s excellent adaptation-reworking doesn’t compete with Panique. Each stands alone as superior filmmaking. Alice is consistently associated with the color red — when she’s trying to ‘accidentally’ meet Hire, one of her red tomatoes gets into his room before she does. In one scene at a boxing match, in the middle of a crowd, Hire and Alice somehow create a moment of intimacy. The editing isolates their cautious passion, in a shot sequence nearly as intense as the pickpocket scene in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street.

The finale in the older Panique requires complicated action and multiple  ironies to achieve closure, whereas Monsieur Hire achieves the same effect with an opposite, understated approach. Perhaps the spirit of Hitchcock is referenced after all, as the closing twist is very much like a famous never-filmed Hitchcock conclusion, one that the censors wouldn’t let him use.

Monsieur Hire may be the best ‘interior thriller’ ever. The devious intrigues that would normally be expressed in actions all occur inside Hire and Alice. The sparse narration doesn’t offer objective explanations for what we see. The climactic confrontation is just as opaque — all three principals remain isolated, each with conflicting ideas of ‘what’s really happening.’ It’s surprisingly satisfying . . . in real life, how often are we absolutely certain that we’ve read interpersonal events correctly?

The French critics hailed both Monsieur Hire and its director. It garnered a clutch of César Awards and won for best sound. Positive coverage by American critics won it good runs in American art houses. Roger Ebert gave it his highest recommendation, describing Leconte’s controlled visual style as ideal to adapt Georges Simenon’s ‘elegant, simple prose.’

The Cohen Film Collection’s Blu-ray of Monsieur Hire is an excellent encoding of this very good-looking show. We saw it once before in the early 1990s, but on an ugly pan-scanned laserdisc.  It is a clean, uncluttered movie, with nary a single unnecessary shot. Leconte moves his camera carefully, not unlike the actions of Monsieur Hire himself. Cameraman Denis Lenoir composes one ideal image after another, often blocking off part of the Panavision frame with a wall, or an out-of focus foreground object.

Making a strong contribution is the original music score my Michael Nyman, which compliments the passion heard in the phonograph record Hire plays when alone in his room . . . Brahms?  The combined music expresses the man’s inner pain and longing, in the same way that older symphonic scores once did. Enhanced by Nyman’s rich themes the music become a concert, as did Bernard Herrmann’s in long sequences without dialogue.

Many Cohen releases have arrived without extras but this disc has two very good added value items. L.A. critic Wade Major’s informative audio commentary tells us that Monsieur Hire established Patrice Leconte’s international reputation; he emphasizes the difference in approach between this version and the ’46 Panique. Major also explains that ‘classics divisions’ at Orion and Sony dominated foreign film imports in the 1980s, a function taken over in the ’90s by the Weinsteins at Miramax.

Very interesting is a new interview piece with both director Patrice Leconte and his star Sandrine Bonnaire. 34 years later, they seem very attached to the movie and excited to talk about its making. In America film dealmaking is such a power-laden business that actors and directors sometimes don’t bother to meet until the filming. The image of a Parisian director casually meeting his potential actress in a restaurant, assuming that the role will be turned down and just trying to find common ground for a friendship, sounds ideal.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Monsieur Hire
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
New interview with director Patrice Leconte and star Sandrine Bonnaire
Audio commentary track by Wade Major.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only, not removable)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: January 26, 2023
(6865hire)

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