L’assassin musicien

Jacquot’s first film tells the story of a violinist from the provinces (Joël Bion) with delusions of grandeur regarding the level of his own talent. He arrives in Paris and boards with a poor woman (Anna Karina) and her daughter (Hélène Coulomb), and the situation triangulates disastrously. The action is roughly based on the first part of Dostoyevsky’s unfinished Netochka Nezvanova. Jacquot got the idea for adapting the book from reading psychoanalyst Moustafa Safouan. With its fixed camera and its ‘atonal’ performances, Jacquot’s debt to Bresson was pointed out by several critics (‘Yet to me it’s nearer to Dreyer or even Fritz Lang, directors like that, than to Bresson,’ he once objected). When the film was released, there was an appreciative editorial published in Le Nouvel Observateur by Jacques Lacan: ‘As a “composition” of images in the musical sense of the word, I think this film is a masterpiece. (…) Benoit Jacquot lards the story so skillfully with psychoanalysis that you don’t realise that the hero is being watched through this prism. The film is so credible because there is no room for interpretation. I wonder whether Benoit Jacquot will ever be able to make another film that is so powerful.’ (KJ)