One Deadly Summer

1983 film by Jean Becker

the film

One Deadly Summer is a 1983 French drama film directed by Jean Becker from a screenplay by Sébastien Japrisot, based on Japrisot's 1977 novel of the same name. Isabelle Adjani won a César Award for Best Actress for her performance in this film. The film was successful in France, gaining 5,137,040 admissions and becoming the second highest grossing film of the year.

Eliane ("Elle"), a beautiful young woman (Isabelle Adjani) settles into a small town in the south of France with her introverted mother (Maria Machado) and physically handicapped father, and soon becomes the subject of wild speculation because of her aloofness and at the same time, her obvious sexuality. The young woman is actually caught up in the desire to avenge the long ago rape of her mother by three men who had arrived at her isolated house in a van which contained an old piano which they were delivering. A shy car mechanic (Alain Souchon) becomes enamored of her, and the woman suddenly sees him in a different light when she learns that his father, now dead, was an Italian immigrant who had owned and tried unsuccessfully to pawn the piano. Intent on taking action against the mechanic's family to right the wrong suffered by her mother, the daughter begins to lose her grip on sanity when she finds out that the men she suspects of the rape are actually innocent. In fact, her father had long ago exacted his own vengeance on the real culprits. This knowledge pushes her over the edge, and she has to be institutionalized. Meanwhile, the young mechanic misunderstands what happened and that leads to tragedy; he tracks down and kills the innocent men Elle had suspected of raping her mother, believing them to be responsible for Elle's current condition.

The film was shot in the villages around Gordes: Saint Saturnin d'Apt, Murs, and Villars.

The original music was written by Georges Delerue. Yves Montand sings his "Trois petites notes de musique", a song that was originally performed by Cora Vaucaire in The Long Absence.

The film was successful in France, gaining 5,137,040 admissions and becoming the second highest grossing film of the year. The New York Times chief film critic Vincent Canby remarked that Adjani "looks smashing in a series of flimsy little dresses" but "the plot is less complicated than devious." Time Out said the film was "directed with verve", and though it "rarely departs from the commercial mainstream, but within those conventions it operates with assurance, subtlety and plenty of surprises."