In a seaside town in the South of France, a strange man gets off a bus in the pouring rain. Mellie (Marlène Jobert) and her mother Juliette (Annie Cordy) make note of him. They pay him no mind, but he gets a good look at them. Later when Mellie is shopping for a new dress, the changing-booth curtain gets opened, and she finds that man staring at her intently. That evening, the man breaks into her home and rapes her.
Buy Rider on the RainDirector René Clément shoots this scene with tact. This is no exploitation picture. He gives us enough information to know what happened and how horrible it was, and that’s enough. He handles the immediate aftermath like a man who understands. Mellie slowly gets up and finds a robe to cover herself. She locks the door and finds the phone. She calls the police but then hesitates. Perhaps she thinks about what the investigation will do to her and her new marriage. Or how long and horrible the trial will be. She hangs up the phone. When her husband calls, she pretends she’s fine.
Then she hears a noise. The man is still in the house. She grabs a shotgun, makes promises that she won’t tell a soul or press charges if he’ll just leave. When he shows himself, she shoots him dead. She puts him in her car, takes him to a cliff, and dumps him into the ocean.
The next day another strange man shows up. At the wedding, he hands Mellie a newspaper with an article about a body being discovered washed up on the beach. At the reception, he’ll corner her, saying he knows she killed him.
He is Harry Dobbs (Charles Bronson), and he says the dead man had something he wants. He follows Mellie around. He comes to her house. He demands she tell him what happened to the bag the dead man was carrying. He seems menacing. But there is also something strangely playful about him. Like he’s not really going to hurt her.
She plays coy. She pretends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There are flashbacks that give us some indication as to why she doesn’t want to spill the beans, but still it seems strange that she doesn’t play his game, that she never lets on that she had anything to do with the dead man. But he’s smart. Almost magically so. He seems to know everything she’s done. Her husband is an airline navigator, so he’s often out of town. But he’s also insanely jealous, and the fear of him returning home with Dobbs in the house elevates the tension.
The film twists and turns in some interesting ways. I won’t spoil them, which leaves me little else to say about the plot. The movie feels very detached from everything. Bronson and Jobert play things close to the vest, rarely allowing any real emotion to show through. Clement keeps things mostly on an even keel. It isn’t so much a thriller as a character study. We keep wondering who Dobbs really is, and why Mellie doesn’t run or go to the police or something.
At two hours, it runs just a smidge too long, and the conclusion is just a bit too pat. There is clearly a lot of Hitchcock influence on Sébastien Japrisot’s script, but he’s well known for subverting the thriller genre, and he’s had a lot of fun playing with it here.
It takes a little patience to enjoy it. This is a film that’s playing with the thriller genre but giving the audience very few actual thrills. The suspense is not quite knowing who these characters are and what they are going to do next. If you can get on that wavelength, there is a lot to enjoy. I found it quite wonderful.
The film was shot in both English and French. Charles Bronson learned his lines in French phonetically. I watched the English version but am looking forward to seeing it in French. It will be interesting to see if Jobert is more natural in her native tongue and how awkward Bronson is out of his. Kino Lorber gives you both options on this release.
It is presented with a new 4K restoration of the original camera negative. It comes with both a UHD disc and a standard Blu-ray. Extras include two audio commentaries – one by film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson; the other from critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson. And there are the usual film trailers.
