This Is Not The Trip I Wanted... (Dr. M (1990))

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Dir. Claude Chabrol

France-Germany-Italy

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I've only started digging into the films of French New Wave director Claude Chabrol, loving his take on the thriller and murder stories within the context of human behaviour and ordinary home life, but Dr. M is the least expected film you could think of to exist in his career. A reinterpretation of Fritz Lang's legendary Dr. Mabuse films, to which I confess I have never seen, I can still, from this point of a lack of knowledge, see how ill advise this final film turned out to be. In a futuristic, but still contemporary West Berlin, a suicide epidemic is taking place that is frightening the entire population. With the only form of escape from the panic being a holiday club which is swarmed by the general public, Lt. Claus Hartman (Jan Niklas) believes that the suicides are connected together and goes out of his way to prove it, a mysterious individual with malicious intent watching on through their minions.

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English language debuts from established auteurs from non-English speaking countries can be mixed. Some directors can be incredibly comfortable with the switch, juggling both sides or becoming part of Hollywood, but others critically stumble and create odd tangents in their filmography. Some films need time to be reflected on - as someone who first felt disappointed with Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights (2007) only to find much to love about it later on - but the problem with Dr. M is that it feels so compromised from presentation to story. The English dialogue is off with actors like Niklas speaking in a secondary language in a German setting with German text but actors of various nationalities in the cast - yes, Berlin in the Cold War era would have been a mix of languages and cultures, but it feels wooden at times here - but it would be possible to pass this if Dr. M had more to it. I would be willing to see a film from the late Chabrol that dropped his usual trademarks to try something very different if it created something very inspired, but this film is horrifically predictable. Niklas is the tough cop with a barely detailed tragedy in his past who no one on his police force believes when he comes up with the idea of a conspiracy with the suicides, and when we're shown how right he is, it's done in the most obvious and unoriginal of ways. Following a woman Sonja Vogler (Jennifer Beals) who is the advertised face of the holiday club, they develop a romance that leads to an late eighties/early nineties sex scene that cuts between moving bodies. The only difference is that Chabrol splices real life images of death and atrocity between the cuts, making for such an inappropriate juxtaposition even if this was the point.

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Chabrol, despite being clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, is rarely as showy as he was visually, very subtle in his use of the camera and what's onscreen. The film's setting however, between the real city and sci-fi sets, is lacklustre to say the least. Whether it's the streets or a secret nightclub where punk youths, dressed almost all in black, spasm around on a glass floor to a metal-dance song hybrid, Dr. M is characterless, not dated enough to be compelling in a visually surreal way, or distinct to suck you in. Good moments of subtle camera work is choked by how pointlessly long the film is, at two hours, and that Alan Bates is wasted despite his importance as a character. It's a film lacking in tension, humour or auteuristic touches. You know from the beginning what's behind the mystery and are forced to wait two hours for the film to catch up with you. What makes it worse is that I could have envisioned Chabrol making a great science fiction film. His obsessions with the films I've seen have been taking genre related tropes and placing them in real life environments with complex morals; this dialogue heavy drama could have been translated to a new genre here. Jean-Luc Godard was able to do it with Alphaville (1965), his intellectual and visual manipulation ideas fully mixed with an interesting sci-fi pulp story, and on the side of the French Left Bank the late Chris Marker, known mostly for his essay films, made La Jetée (1962), science fiction as interpreted entirely through still images. Dr. M could have become this, but sadly doesn't. Instead it's a dull Euro-pudding of a film instead of a gem or a fascinating failure.

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