Une place parmi les vivants

From Fritz Lang’s House by the River to the thriller Best Seller and Chabrol’s In the Heart of the Lie, murder and writing have often merged in a disquietingly vampiric symbiosis: when evil meets art – and the master criminal meets his erstwhile biographer – the inventiveness of violent crime suddenly redoubles in light of its imminent immortalisation. And what a quagmire for the writer, who grapples not only with the moral ramifications of glorifying (and egging on) the killer, but also with the anti-aesthetic implications of fiction not only simulating but actively creating a gruesome ‘real’.A Place Among the Living is Ruiz’s clever contribution to this gleefully tricky tradition. Failed writer Ernest Ripper encounters very successful serial killer Joseph Arcimboldo; their literary collaboration generates the writer’s fame, but also several doubts about the villain’s authenticity.Ruiz again plays wonderfully, as he did in Genealogies of a Crime, with the Hollywood conventions of film noir. But he places them in an intriguing historic context: 1950s Paris, where existentialist philosophy mixes with the activism of the FLN (Algerian liberation movement). Ruiz gives us an idiosyncratically internationalist neo noir, ranging in its references from Chandler to Ellroy via Simenon. But murders are never just murders in his films: death always triggers a metaphysical disquisition on after-life, the undead and the scarcely living. Adrian Martin