Red Eyes (film)

Red Eyes
FrenchLes Yeux rouges
Directed byYves Simoneau
Written byYves Simoneau
Produced byDoris Girard
StarringMarie Tifo
Pierre Curzi
Raymond Bouchard
CinematographyClaude LaRue
Edited byAndré Corriveau
Music byManeige
Production
company
Le Loup Blanc
Distributed byLes Films du Crépuscule
Release date
  • 1982 (1982)
Running time
89 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageFrench

Red Eyes (French: Les Yeux rouges) is a Canadian thriller drama film, directed by Yves Simoneau and released in 1982.[1] The film is a dramatization of the "automne chaud", a real-life series of voyeurism and sexual assault incidents in Quebec City in 1979 that culminated in the murder of young actress France Lachapelle.[2]

The film stars Marie Tifo as Marie-Louise, the film's version of Lachapelle, as well as Jean-Marie Lemieux, Pierre Curzi, Raymond Bouchard, Denise Proulx, Pierrette Robitaille, Rémy Girard, Gaston Lepage, Micheline Bernard, Denise Gagnon, Paul Hébert, Serge Thibodeau, Bob Walsh and Yves Bourque.

Critical response

Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau of Panorama Cinema called the film a "second-rate giallo", and opined that elements of it seemed copied from Black Christmas and the films of Dario Argento.[3]

For the Montreal Gazette, Maureen Peterson gave it a mixed review, praising its camera work and acting but assessing the film as "caught between two perfectly valid objectives. Is it a thriller designed primarily to entertain, or a cinematic essay on violence and sexism?"[4]

Legacy

Lachapelle had been a friend and colleague of actor and filmmaker Robert Lepage in the Quebec City theatre scene, with the result that Lepage was the last person to see her alive and was actually the police investigator's initial suspect before being cleared, yet Simoneau asked Lepage to play the killer in Red Eyes.[5]

This inspired Lepage's 1996 film Polygraph (Le Polygraphe), which centred on an actress who was cast as the victim in a film about a murder despite having personally known both the victim and the primary suspect.[6]

References

  1. ^ Gerald Pratley, A Century of Canadian Cinema. Lynx Images, 2003. ISBN 1-894073-21-5. p. 180.
  2. ^ Charles-Henri Ramond, "Yeux rouges, Les – Film de Yves Simoneau". Films du Québec, August 15, 2021.
  3. ^ Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau, "Yeux rouges, Les (1982)". Panorama Cinema, August 2, 2015.
  4. ^ Maureen Peterson, "Flashes of brilliance and a few shocks in director's first film". Montreal Gazette, November 20, 1982.
  5. ^ David Lawrence Pike, Canadian Cinema Since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World. University of Toronto Press, 2012. ISBN 9781442612402. p, 166.
  6. ^ Gary Michael Dault, "Robert Lepage's Le Confessionnal & Le Polygraphe". Take One, Spring 1997.


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