“One Deadly Summer” (1983)
If “Possession” is Adjani at her most extreme, then “One Deadly Summer” shows her at her most complicated. She is Elle, a mysterious young woman who moves to a provincial French town and catches the attention of all the citizens with her aloof beauty. She becomes involved with mechanic Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon), and the two are soon engaged. As the film progresses, we learn more about the circumstances around Elle’s moving to town – she has come to avenge the rape of her mother, two decades earlier. A misapprehension causes her to believe that Pin-Pon’s father was one of the culprits, and the situation spirals, with tragic results. The plot of Jacques Becker’s movie unfurls slowly and enigmatically, with a narration that rotates between the characters and several big, game-changing twists. Adjani’s Elle is at the center of all of it, and she’s a study in contrasts – forbidding and alluring; sweet and bitter; in control, and very much out of it. She is dangerously manipulative and very aware of the power her looks have over people; she always knows just what to do to get what she wants. And yet, despite all that apparent power, there’s deep loneliness at her core. She’s playing a part with everyone she meets, and there’s no-one she can be herself with – the only person who sees through her various charades is Pin-Pon’s deaf aunt (Suzanne Flon), whose understanding observation, ‘She shows her bottom so she doesn’t have to show her true feelings’, is as pithy as it is accurate. Whilst Elle’s actions wreck the lives of multiple people over the course of the story, the complex vulnerability that Adjani gives her means that she remains sympathetic, even in her cruelest moments.
Honorable Mentions
Adjani’s sole executive producing credit to date was for historical drama “Camille Claudel,” and her commanding lead turn earned her a second Academy Award nomination. Like “Possession” (and yet, very much not like “Possession”…), the reputation of Elaine May’s daffy comedy “Ishtar” has grown exponentially in the years since its release, and Adjani’s performance as the love interest of Warren Beatty’s amiable doofus is a prime example of her underrated comedic talent. Though she never collaborated with Agnès Varda on a solo feature-length project, Adjani is luminous in her cameo in Varda’s “One Hundred and One Nights.” Talking of cameos, Adjani is one of many acting luminaries to appear as themselves on the internationally beloved French TV series “Call My Agent!”. And while her movie appearances have been getting fewer and farther between, her recent supporting turn as the gleefully domineering matriarch in Romain Gavras’s energetic gangster tale “The World is Yours” proves that her star power remains undimmed.
