Barracuda

A confusing and sadistic chamber play by the young director and composer Philippe Haim, who did not just design the consciously kitsch private universe of his protagonist, but also the apt and ironic score.The film is about a life and death duel between two men. Clement (a fantastic role by Jean Rochefort) is an elderly man who lives in a fantasy world. Luc (Guillaume Canet), a young comic-strip artist, is his new neighbour. Clement invites Luc to dinner to get acquainted, but Luc forgets the appointment. He shouldn’t have done that. Clement looks like a harmless fool who thinks he can communicate with his idol Fred Astaire and who regards a plastic show-window dummy as his living wife Violette, but it soon becomes apparent that he is far from innocent. He lures Luc into his strange apartment, that is entirely decorated in the style of the music hall, as a temple to Astaire. Then he chains him in the bathroom before locking him up in a special room with no windows, a kind of pharaoh’s tomb. Luc turns out to be a formidable opponent within this cruel cat and mouse game. He plays along with the strange visions of Clement and penetrates deeper and deeper into his psychotic world, with the final aim of turning the tables. But before things get that far, Luc has already been gone for a year. The media treats his disappearance as a case like the notorious Dutroux affair in Belgium. And that is not far from the truth. (GjZ)