Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.5

Monsieur Hire Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 28, 2022

Cohen Media Group doesn't always include a bunch of extras on its Blu-ray releases, and so both the commentary track by Wade Major and a fun set of interviews with director Patrice Leconte and star Sandrine Bonnaire that are included with this release are especially welcome, and they provide a lot of interesting background information on this film which is regularly cited as one of the classics from that era of French film (and perhaps beyond). As Wade Major gets into, and Patrice Leconte kind of amusingly if obliquely refers to, Georges Simenon's source novel Les Fiançailles de M. Hire had come out in 1933 and then kind of incredibly didn't get just one, but two*, adaptations, both released at almost the same time in two (actually three) different countries! What seems to be a Portuguese film called Viela, Rua Sem Sol came out in September 1947 according to the IMDb, and if I'm reading things correctly, was soon released in Spain under the title Barrio. French folks got their own "native" adaptation courtesy of a Julien Duvivier outing called Panique, one which caught the eye of Patrice Leconte, though as he amusingly recounts, he wasn't paying attention during the credits and so had missed the fact that the film was based on a Simenon novel. He long thought about simply remaking Panique until a friend pointed out the Simenon genesis and suggested merely making a new adaptation of the source novel might be a better path forward. It may sound like it's more or less the same thing, but Leconte seems to suggest it gave him new insight about how to proceed with his version.

*If I understood his comments correctly, Major mentions three adaptations in his commentary, but I think maybe he accounted for Viela, Rua Sem Sol and Barrio as two separate films, when it seems to me they're the same under different titles.

One of the kind of interesting things about both Panique and this adaptation is how they don't really address one of the central subtexts of Simenon's original source novel, namely that a kind of seemingly anti-social tailor named Hire (Michel Blanc) is Jewish. (It's notable that as much as Hire insists he doesn't like people in the film, the first vignette actually shows him kind of sweetly helping a child with hiccups, though Leconte lights Hire's face almost like it's in a horror movie.) As Wade Major gets into, the Jewish element doesn't necessarily mean observant in a religious sense, but at least culturally, and with a suggestion that this Jewishness is overt enough that making Hire the central suspect in the murder of a young girl instantly acquires whole new layers of meaning and context. There is perhaps a good reason why Panique, made in the more or less immediate wake of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, might not have wanted to "play up" that particular element, but even in Panique, there's a certain vigilante rush to judgment that definitely brands that film's Hire as "the other".

Here, the formulation is really more in terms of a cat and mouse power struggle between Hire and an Inspector (André Wilms) who considers Hire his chief suspect in the murder. As Major points out in his commentary, even the brief first vignette between these two characters is a not so subtle play for power and both engage in unrepentant mind games with the other. Meanwhile, it's disclosed that Hire is something of a voyeur, unable to form any "normal" relationship with a woman, and therefore frequenting brothels and spying on his beautiful new neighbor, Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire). The film does kind of interestingly occasionally depart from its Hire-centric perspective to offer more of an "omniscient narrator" approach as the relationship between Alice and her boyfriend Émile (Luc Thuillier) is developed. That said, it's actually the interaction between Hire's voyeurism and Émile's escapades (for want of a better term) that suddenly thrusts this film into both precarious emotional territory and some really interesting suspense.

Monsieur Hire perhaps ups the ante of a traditional ménage à trois into a ménage à quatre in a way, since it's the unpredictable interplay between Hire, Alice, Émile and the Inspector which generate the narrative once all the pieces are in play. What's so fascinating about the whole setup here is that Hire is definitely the Other, at least in some of the same ways as in Panique, but he also turns out to be victimized by more than merely the suspicions of a single minded Inspector. There's an inexorable march toward tragedy as Hire arguably unwisely tries to develop a relationship with Alice, which of course leads to disaster in the film's closing moments.

Wade Major actually mentions the arresting (no pun intended) final "moment" between Hire and Alice as unique in the annals of film, which suggests to me he may not have seen the much more recent Men, which actually repeatedly utilizes the same general "motif", not just in terms of what's being depicted, but also courtesy of the use of slow motion.

Monsieur Hire Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Monsieur Hire is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection, an imprint of Cohen Media Group, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. (Cohen Film Collection has its own sub-imprint, Classics of French Cinema, and this release is further branded that way.) The film begins with a brief text card announcing the restoration in 2020 done by Pathé in 4K. This is a pretty stunning looking transfer a lot of the time, though it is intentionally on the cool side quite often, with an emphasis on green and blue tones which Leconte actually explicitly addresses, if briefly, in the interview included on this disc as a supplement. That tendency toward not pushing things in a warmer direction can lead to almost desaturated moments, as in the very opening vignette documenting the body and the Inspector. Things do warm up appreciably in some later sequences, including several scenes that feature a kind of buttery yellow tone, though quite a few scenes still have pale flesh tones and a decidedly wintry (or at least autumnal without the bright leaf colors) look, and I personally wouldn't have complained with just a bit more vivid suffusion generally speaking. Grain is very tightly resolved throughout the presentation.

Monsieur Hire Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Monsieur Hire features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track in the original French. The film's sound design isn't especially baroque, though there are occasional nice bursts of sound effects, as in the big thunderstorm where Alice finally sees Hire spying on her. Michael Nyman's score sounds great throughout, and all dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly. In the broken record department, this is just the latest release of a foreign language title by Cohen where they've chosen to force subtitles (meaning the English subtitles are not optional).

Monsieur Hire Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• New Interview with Director Patrice Leconte and Star Sandrine Bonnaire (HD; 38:41) is a lot of fun, and has been edited so that the two (who were apparently interviewed separately) are often commenting about each other or the same thing. Leconte in particular seems rather elfin and is quite funny. Subtitled in English.


• Monsieur Hire Trailer (HD; 1:05)


• Audio Commentary by Wade Major, producer/host of the DigiGods podcast, film critic for CineGods and KPCC FilmWeek is accessible under the Audio Menu.

Monsieur Hire Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Monsieur Hire is touted both in some reviews and on Wade Major's commentary track as "Hitchcockian", but while it does offer some of the psychological suspense that Hitchcock's films often did, along with a perhaps unfairly maligned protagonist, as Hitchcock's films also often did, it has its own incredibly distinctive flavor, and I'd say in some ways it ends up being more disturbing than your "average" Hitchcock movie, if I might be permitted a brief moment of heresy. Technical merits are solid, and the supplements very enjoyable, though I sure do wish Cohen would start offering optional subtitles. Highly recommended.