Le prestige de la mort

Moullet, the jester of the nouvelle vague, plays an elderly director who is past his best. He comes up with a plan to breathe new life into his fame and status: under the motto ‘speak no evil over the dead’, he fakes his own death and adopts the identity of a dead tramp (whom he finds on a deserted Alp, typical for Moullet). The media does indeed take the bait – but only after Moullet has had to put his plan briefly on ice because his colleague JLG dies…
In his very own way, both film loving and comic, Moullet plays with the role of being director in the present film climate, in which the sun doesn’t even shine on French veterans. The result is a masterfully weird snigger movie for connoisseurs and film lovers.
Moullet: ‘My last film, Les Naufragés de la D17, borrowed much of the frivolous structure of The Road to Yesterday, the masterpiece by Cecil B. DeMille. This film was inspired by the basic idea of another film by DeMille, The Whispering Chorus (1917). But the theme I investigate here is very topical; you also see it in Il regista di matrimoni by Bellochio. The tone that was dramatic in the case of DeMille, is here more like a joke. And while you hardly saw me in Les naufragés de la D17, I can be seen in virtually every scene in Le prestige de la mort playing the role of… Luc Moullet.’ (GT)

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