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Lack of good storyline.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

You can see what this movie is trying to say....in fact, you can see it all too well, as it keeps beating you over the head with its two central ideas: Michel Serrault has lost his daughter and sees Isabelle Adjani as a potential replacement, to the degree that he is willing to overlook her murderous tendencies, while Adjani has developed these murderous tendencies because she has also lost her father at a young age. This story could have been told in a 30-minute short; in 115 (or 95, depending on which version you watch) minutes it is plodding and repetitive (she kills, he follows her, she kills, he follows her, she kills....), not to mention unbelievable. Serrault gives a good performance, however he spends about 80% of the movie mumbling to himself and has little interaction with other people, which makes his character tedious not before long. To fair, there ARE a couple of memorable scenes: Adjani's cold-blooded razor slashing of another woman is one, the car stunt at the end is another. ** out of 4.

There is, alas, only one Prevert and if only Audiard realized and accepted that he may have abandoned his attempts to eclipse Prevert as a master of word-play and been content to try and equal him though even that was never going to happen. Claude Miller is definitely quirky and probably wouldn't know how to go about shooting an 'ordinary' film and as a result he either misses by a mile or hits one out of the park. This is one of his most surreal efforts but also one of his best but it helps if you are prepared to accept wackiness as Art form. A private investigator, Serrault, barely going through the motions of living since he allowed a personal tragedy - his wife walked out on him taking the daughter he never really knew and the daughter subsequently died aged seven - to color everything that came after, is assigned a fairly routine case to discredit what is assumed to be the gold-digging fiancé of a wealthy young man; instead he finds she is a serial killer and allows himself to fantasise that she is his lost daughter miraculously restored to life and is happy to watch passively as she moves from country to country leaving a string of dead man - plus one lesbian lover - in her wake; he is also not above covering her tracks. In terms of realism it makes Lord Of The Rings look like a documentary but it is also compelling. If you like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing you'll like.

There's a private detective who keeps an old b/w photo with him. It shows a class of little girls and one of them is his daughter but he doesn't know which one so they're all his daughter. There's a mysterious girl, beautiful and a little sad, she goes around changing names and wigs and killing rich men (but not for their money, the money only the means by which she can sustain herself until she can kill again) and she tells outrageous made-up stories about a father she probably never met. The movie sets itself up as something potentially quirky, a noir patchwork where the dialogue is witty, a corpse is dumped in a lake, and the private dick tails the mysterious woman from murder to murder.It's around that point when the movie must decide the course, when the crime mystery begins to dissolve into something irrelevant because the private dick is not trying to catch her any more, in fact he starts erasing her traces and lying to his boss, and he calls her "Marie", the name of his long lost daughter, so that we're not asking whys anymore but rather staring obsession straight in the eye. This newfound surrogate daughter becomes a compulsion but it only starts there. It gets confusing, almost surreal like characters can foresee things, but it's an interesting confusion for me because the latenight atmosphere is right and something intuitive is suggested between the two protagonists. It's like we're in the cavelike gloom of a hotel staircase and the plot is used like an oil lamp that serves to increase that gloom and mystery for us and we can't tell at once what is going on on the top floor until we're halfway up there.At one point there's a TV showing FW Murnau's The Last Laugh and the girl begins fashioning another madeup tale about her father, tailored this time after Emil Janning's hotel porter character in Murnau's movie, the tale is outrageous and weepy like bad melodrama but it's the telling that makes it poignant, like the magnitude of the lie suggests the depth of what is broken. Michel Serrault's private detective is one of the most fascinating movie characters of the 80's, he's methodical in his work but also a little detached from everything around him like Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlow in The Long Goodbye, and the only thing that keeps him going is the pursuit of obsession. Right down to the amazingly sad ending, Mortelle Randonnee is a forgotten gem, a little flawed around the edges and the details sometimes go out of focus like we're in a car and the view from the window is blurred but we stop at places and bizarre things happen there (often at gunpoint) and then we're on the move again, and it's that neon- lit blur of something sad and desperate that makes it fascinating.

Mortelle randonée is a brilliant and somewhat noir-ish thriller with a subtle twist of comedy. Isabelle Adjani's beauty has never been more glowing than here as the central femme fatale, and Michel Serrault manages to be both touching and very funny as the lonesome private eye, in search of a long lost daughter. As an added bonus Carla Bley's sexy and jazzy score is simply stunning and makes this overlooked gem a definite must-see. Director Claude Miller has had a long impressive career – he started out working for Truffaut – but only rarely has his work been this relaxed, cool and yet still magnificently melodramatic. The inferior "Eye of the Beholder" (1999) was based on the same novel (and Ewan McGregor was way to young for the part). The Wellspring DVD contains only heavily edited American release and this version simply doesn't work. Wait for someone to release this wonderful film uncut.(actually TF1 already have - with French subtitles only!)