Diabolique

Yet another mediocre remake of a brilliant French film. The original, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1955, is a taut nail-biter that takes its cues from Hitchcock and then spins everything around 180 degrees until the audience is nearly sick with terror. The remake takes the original and spins things around 180 degrees and then some, until the audience has a headache and trounces the projectionist. Nicole (Stone) and Mia (Adjani) are a pair of lovers who spend their days working at a remote private school for wayward young boys; it's the kind of institution your parents may have threatened you with as a child to make you behave, all rotting porticos and moss-covered walls. Mia is the principal who also teaches French; Nicole (brilliant casting) the school's icy math teacher. They're lovers, but the meek Mia is married to Guy Baran (Palminteri), an abusive, genuinely evil man who's meanwhile having a blatant affair with Nicole (bear in mind this is based on a French film). Disgusted with Guy's overbearing ways, the two women decide to kill him by inviting him out to Nicole's suburban Pittsburgh home over a holiday weekend and drowning him -- violently -- in the bathtub. All goes as planned until signs appear that Guy may not be as dead as he at first appeared, and police detective Bates begins nosing around. Chechik's new version is easy on the eye, to say the very least. With the glamorous Stone and the positively angelic Adjani, it could hardly be anything but. Shot with an abundance of rain, mist, fog, and an overall sense of dreary malaise, Diabolique is a Gothic school fantasy come to life, but like the corpse in the scum-covered tub, it's still dead in the water. For one thing, Chechik relies far too heavily on lingering shots of what appears to be Adjani's only facial expression: the doe-eyed look of dawning terror you'd catch in the visage of soon-to-become roadkill just before impact. It's a great look, granted, but Chechik uses it like a bad chef uses salt -- there's too much of it, and you know damn well it's just there to hide the flaws. Bates' detective character may well get the plot going after a relatively slow beginning, but she's also intrusive; the film seems to slow down every time the detective appears. That's not Bates' fault -- she's just following the script, which, by the way, has her do some of the darnedest things. Those nutty cops! When will they learn? Do yourself a favor and go catch Simone Signoret in the original Les Diaboliques. It remains to this day one of the all-time great thrillers, and this… this is just American cheese.