The truest movie translation, to date, of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- a category that includes the likes of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, René Clement's Purple Noon, and Wim Wenders's The American Friend. Despite the offbeat casting of Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou (neither of whom has ever been on better behavior) and despite director Claude Miller's professed points of disagreement with and departure from Highsmith, the doctoring of the novel, This Sweet Sickness, works mainly, pragmatically, to make it more wieldy as screen material. And in stripping away certain, to him, dispensable elements, Miller more clearly than Highsmith uncovers the theme of the illogicality and immutability of personal predilections, personal passions. His ending, as hair-raising in its way as Highsmith's extended description of a mental breakdown, is an outburst of lyricism as audacious and magical as anything in Vigo or Cocteau. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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