Diabolique

UK Release Date. 6 September 1996
Certification. 18 
Running Time. 1 hour 47 mins
Director. Jeremiah Chechik
Cast. Isabelle Adjani, Kathy Bates, Chazz Palminteri, Sharon Stone.
Rating. 19%

Review.

Jeremiah Chechik's Diabolique isn't so much an inferior remake of one of the greatest thrillers of all time - it is an abhorrent desecration.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955) is a psychological thriller par excellence, in which the mistress (Simone Signoret) and timid wife (Véra Clouzot) conspire to poison cruel headmaster (Paul Meurisse) and deposit his body in the disused school swimming pool. When the pool is subsequently drained and the murder victim's body absent, the resulting series of tortuous plot developments result in a nerve-jangling storyline of Hitchcockian proportions. Indeed, Alfred Hitchcock was rumoured to be interested in acquiring the rights for the book, Celle qui n'était plus (She who was no more), but the authors, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, penned the screenplay for Vertigo for Hitchcock instead. 

The 1996 Diabolique film begins promisingly and at times is almost a line-by-line, even shot-by-shot, remake of Clouzot's original. Since the original was so cleverly crafted, that is no bad thing. Les Diaboliques' elegant ending - which audiences were urged not to reveal - is discarded in favour of a ludicrous struggle in the shallow end of a swimming pool, in which one character receives a rake embedded in their skull. The end result is more likely to produce sniggers rather than gasps.

The cast comprises of,

• Chazz Palminteri (Guy Baran). A manipulative, abusive and controlling principal, who runs St Anselm's School for Boys - a run-down boarding school on the outskirts of Pittsburgh - and treats the women in his life as sexual playthings.
• Isabelle Adjani (Mia Baran). Guy's fragile, young wife with a congenital heart condition. Whilst frail and vulnerable, Adjani is afforded little scope to display raw emotion and spends the majority of the film ridiculously agog in horror.
• Sharon Stone (Nicole Horner). A two-dimensional, chain-smoking, cold-as-ice, trashy blonde mistress. Stone's inappropriate wardrobe makes the character seem entirely out of place in the educational setting - in one scene, she delivers a Maths lesson to her class in a black cocktail dress.

There is no denying that the two female leads look great together - there is an implied, and believable, frisson between them. But as with much of Sharon Stone's immediate work post Basic Instinct, there was an expectation to reproduce her Catherine Tramell role. Stone clashed with executives at the production company, Morgan Creek Entertainment and director, Jeremiah Chechik over her refusal to perform an apparently contractual nude scene.

In truth, the cast is not the problem with Diabolique. The script is. Everything is very linear and literal. Chechik coughs up cliché after cliché in a futile attempt to produce a modern twist to an overly familiar plot. Much of the time gratuitous specifics - from an opening nude scene of Adjani gasping for life on the bathroom floor to Stone's outlandish leopard-skin costumes come across as flatly absurd. All of which is entirely at odds with the spirit of Clouzot's original.