“This is the film in which I exercised my freedom the most, the project being almost beyond the limits of what was conceivable.” — Luc Moullet

For Le Prestige de la mort (2006), Luc Moullet took the premise of a 1918 Cecil B. DeMille melodrama, The Whispering Chorus, and retooled it into a hilarious examination of his own place, or lack thereof, in the cinematic pantheon. Moullet plays himself as a down-and-out director struggling to finance a Thomas Hardy adaptation. Coming across a dead body while hiking in the mountains, he hatches a plan to swap identities with the deceased, in order to benefit from the surge in interest enjoyed by every filmmaker upon their death. Things soon begin to go awry, and before long Moullet will be dealing with police officers, asylums, sinister strangers, and his increasingly exasperated wife (Antonietta Pizzorno). 

Moullet’s longtime interest in English literature found an outlet in one of his most startling works, Le Fantôme de Longstaff (1996), an adaptation of a Henry James short story. The film exhibits a facility for drama that Moullet rarely had a chance to exercise elsewhere, its direct and powerful mise en scène calling to mind the classic literary adaptations of Alexandre Astruc and Claude Chabrol.

Programme
Le Fantôme de Longstaff, dir. Luc Moullet, France 1996, 20 mins.
Le Prestige de la mort, dir. Luc Moullet, France 2006, 72 mins.