Ann-Gisel Glass

A film from Godard’s 1980s period of reinvention, Détective has images as beautiful as paintings and cleverly fragments shards of movie conventions to forge new critiques. Promising his producers a genre film, they instead got a caustically funny remix of all possible hotel movie mysteries.

In Jacques Doillon’s abrasive melodrama, an encounter between two couples takes tragic proportions as the quartet of lovers play with burning jealousy and possessive desire. The vampiristic and self-destructive impulses of love are explored with piercing honesty and through impassioned performances.