Reviews

For a start, it's not as boring, stale and jejune as Greek mythology. Really not up to Out 1, Merry-Go-Round, etc., but definitely a nice watch.

However, someone has posted a comment making this movie "a modern Electra". That's not true. Of course, Electra must have been very much in Rivette's mind when conceiving the script. But the influences are far richer than just the Electra myth, and Rivette presents a much more subtle story than just a modern Electra. The most significant difference might be the motif for the murder of the father. Agamemnon was not murdered for noble reasons (as th father in the movie), but because Clytemnestra had an affair and wanted to get rid of him. This takes us away from the primitive Greek "A sleeps with B's C", "C's D therefore kills B and A's E", but then "E's F tries to sleep with A and F's G before killing himself, but fails to kill C" etc. Of course, we never learn in the movie where the brother got the photo (which reminds one of the oracle telling Electra's brother to get a revenge for the murder of their father), but then again, all the stuff about shooting the wrong person has nothing to do with the story of Electra. Well, notice the complete lack of intervention by the gods (in this case, mostly Appolo and Athena) in the movie; once again, something without which a Greek myth isn't a Greek myth anymore. Also, the nice twist at the end of the movie - Sylvie getting shot herself, again by accident - has no counterpart in the Greek myth. The story of the real Electra actually ends sort of well after Orest is found not guilty by the judges.

On the side: The story of Electra can only be told faithfully if there is a story of a war in the background. Well, in the movie there isn't.

So, please... It's really nice for some people that they are oh-so-cultivated. But they should either come up with a subtle analysis of the links between a modern script and some Greek (or otherwise classical) subject, or leave it.

Anyway, having read the comment which turns "Secret Défense" into a remake of Vertigo, I should have to apologize. At least Electra clearly is intended reference/source of inspiration... whatever. On the other hand, the comparison with Vertigo and the comparison of Vertigo to Greenaway's "Cook, Thief, Wife, Lover" is so far fetched you cannot even see where the commentator got the idea. I've noticed the tendency of some (mostly Americans) to think of Hitchcock as the center of the cinematographic universe. Let me tell you: He isn't. He has made some entertaining films, but they are mostly based on overacted simplistic scripts, which fake psycho-grammatic depth but really just display simple psychologically prototyped characters.

About the title of "Secret Défense". Those (non-native speakers of French) who are wondering about the strange ordering of adjective and noun in the title in French should go here: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_classifi%C3%A9e_en_France In this light, it is of course stupid of the US distributor to call the film "Secret Defense" in English - because that, as far as I can judge, means something completely different (i.e., it just has its literal meaning in English).

This is so lame. After years of hearing about this "legendary realistic street drama" I watched it last night. And WHAT a disappointment! Stereotypical characters wherever you go: the typical stubborn unsocializable street kid getting started on his criminal career, the embarrassing wannabe-philanthropic journalist (Degen) who cannot live up to his ideals, the sad alcoholic prostitute (Mattes) with a child... even the police are as clichéd and cruel as any late 1968 "revolutionary" desires them to be... And there is of course the rich homosexual guy trying to seduce the street kid, then humiliating him. No, please! OK, finally i know where the German masochistic "street kid" tradition ("Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" and similar schmonzetten) came from. Nothing is more useless than false realism by stiff and dogmatic literature or film students! The horrible acting (from the amateurish stiff movements of the male lead Wierczejewskito the usual stage-like overacting of the autorenfilm-zombie Eva Mattes) makes it worse. (the short scene with the extremely funny Alfred Edel obviously READING his part from the sheet in front of him is a highlight, of course.) Also, the fact that the whole film is dubbed, partly by other actors as it seems (maybe the original performances were too bad) does NOT add to the alleged "realistic" feel.

Of course, a film with only stereotypical characters in stereotypical situations has one big disadvantage: It's completely predictable. You KNOW right from the beginning that things will end badly, that the boy WILL eventually commit his first murder, etc. truly boring.

The camera work of Vacano is not very remarkable. He does not compare to Ballhaus (ho rescued some Fassbinder films). I've seen better in the Derrick episodes of the time. Lucky we are that Roland Klick didn't get a chance to misunderstand the experiments of Lars von Trier yet. Otherwise i bet my boots he would have used heavily shaking hand camera to make things even more realistic. What? I'm not shaking half as much as the camera in "Breaking the Waves" - where's the realism in that? Sorry, I digress.

Again, even after watching this legend, i must hold up my thesis that Germany's finest cinematographic achievements in the seventies are the early Derrick episodes. This is truly embarrassing for German cinema, but since German cinema in the autorenfilm era produced only such clichéd boring time wasters as "Supermarkt", the conventionalized (cop) stereotypes in the Derrick series at least give you enough identification to sit through the 55 minutes.

The scene in "Supermarkt" where they pathetically try to rob the supermarket is kind of funny, though. However, I recommend "Take the Money and Run" for some truly funny slapstick along such lines.

Since I'm a nice person, I'll give Klick's "Deadlock" a try, though. Looks significantly cooler, judging from the first ten minutes which I watched.