Jump to content

Dossier 51

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dossier 51
Directed byMichel Deville
Written byMichel Deville
Gilles Perrault
Produced byPhilippe Dussart
StarringFrançoise Béliard
CinematographyClaude Lecomte
Edited byRaymonde Guyot
Music byJean Schwarz
Distributed byGaumont
Release date
  • 30 August 1978 (1978-08-30)
Running time
108 minutes
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
Box office$2 million[1]

Dossier 51 (French: Le Dossier 51) is a 1978 French crime drama film directed by Michel Deville and based on a novel by Gilles Perrault. Deville and Perrault won a César Award for Best Writing for their adaptation. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.[2]

Plot

[edit]

An elaborate surveillance operation is mounted by a French intelligence agency on a French diplomat, codenamed 51. While his professional life is not suspect, clandestine investigations into his private life reveal an increasing number of vulnerabilities.

Only surviving child of his adoring mother, she reveals that he was hated by her husband, who had betrayed his biological father to the Gestapo. At his Catholic school, the priests recall his propensity for fantasy about other boys. Military service kept him in an all-male environment and former comrades remember his construction of alternative realities about them. After a student affair with an anarchist of boyish appearance, he hastily married a girl of good family, who gave him two children but sleeps with other men.

When an agent wins his confidence and starts revealing knowledge of his past, he kills himself by driving into a tree. The operation is wound up.

Cast

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Le Dossier 51 (1978) - JPBox-Office".
  2. ^ "Festival de Cannes: Dossier 51". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-05-23.
[edit]