This movie has not been available for years ,and its reissue is cause for celebration ;it's not representative of Cayatte's production and it probably took his audience aback at the time : no miscarriage of justice, no trial, no good cause ,none of his usual trademarks ,but a pure film noir ,a complex -perhaps too complicated- plot .
Adapted from a Sebastien Japrisot novel by the director, Jean Anouilh and the writer himself (Jean-Baptiste Rossi is a transparent anagram ,get it?) ,its treatment of amnesia was nothing but derivative ; the novel did not conclude ,but the movie did : the truth (?) is revealed halfway through ,but the movie does not suffer for it : it does not matter when you deal with actresses such as Madeleine Robinson -her piercing eyes really give the jitters- and Dany Carrel ,in her lifetime part ,playing two (and even three) characters convincingly with aplomb :she has the chops to portray a very sexy nymphomaniac spoilt rich kid , her "Cinderella-esque" cousin, and the poor lost amnesiac : quite a feat and it's really too bad she was not given more interesting roles afterward. Both actresses' playing verges on camp ,and it sometimes recalls Robert Aldrich 's sixties female duels .
It' s definitely a deadly female movie; a story of domination : Do is Mi's punching bag whom she loves to humiliate ; but both girls are manipulated by Jeanne (Madeleine Robinson) ; the rapport the latter has with both cousins has discreet lesbian undertones ,(which the awful English remake "trap for Cinderella " shamefully exploited,with disastrous results )..
It's mainly the story of a distraught girl in search of her identity ; the cast and credits are pure subjective camera , with blurred figures ,which makes sense in the case of an amnesiac ; the more the poor girl tries to find back her past,the more she's confused ; is she Mi ,the heiress,or Do the unfortunate cousin? The movie becomes a giant jig saw puzzle, the piece of which does not really fit together .The male cast , apart from seasoned René Dary as the good surgeon ,provides the movie with its low point: none of them can hold a candle to the outstanding actresses.
And the writers put the heroine in a harrowing search : in the garage ,she tries to catch her cousin but it looks like a nightmare , a girl desesperately trying to find the other herself ; the spoilt girl who thinks that she can have everything and everyone (the scene in the elevator when she imprisons Do's boyfriend is revealing ) .But the dominatrix is Jeanne : a pushy ruthless matron who tries to create her own girl : one of the best scenes shows both woman looking themselves in a mirror; a mirror which is often used all through the movie,quite rightly so.
Don Malcolm included it in his "the French had a name for it" San Francisco film noir festival. And he's a connoisseur of the French cinema!
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