Altered Innocence announced taking North American distribution rights on a new, 2K restoration of THE STRANGLER (L’Étrangleur) from the late French filmmaking auteur Paul Vecchiali, who passed away earlier this year. Initially a selection of the 23rd Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section, the film was released two years later in France in 1972, where it was also given a limited re-release in 2015. Despite this, THE STRANGLER, which Vecchiali wrote and directed, has never seen a stateside theatrical release —which will change later this year when, following screenings as part of the celebrated Austin genre event Fantastic Fest and the prestigious New York Film Festival this month, Altered Innocence will open the arthouse psycho-thriller in select U.S. theaters this fall, with a VOD and physical media release to follow. The new version of the film was restored with the help of Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC).
An unconventional French giallo released before the sub-genre’s popularity boom resulting from filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, THE STRANGLER is regarded as Vecchiali’s most ambitious work, his first foray into genre, and a highlight of his overarching filmography. The film centers on Emile (Jacques Perrin, The Young Girls of Rochefort), a handsome young man targeting women he believes are too depressed to go on living. As multiple women fall to Emile’s suffocating white scarf, inspector Simon Dangret, the detective assigned to track down the killer, resorts to seriously unorthodox and even unethical methods to get his man with the assistance of Anna, a beautiful woman who believes herself to be a potential victim.
Praised as a “complex, melancholic meditation on isolation as well as a portrait of collective hysteria” by the New York Film Festival, the film equally subverts and indulges in the conventions of the giallo with unexpected beauty and refinement. Vecchiali has been hailed as an “icon of a rebellious, reflexive, and emotionally excessive cinema” by Le Monde and celebrated for his prolific filmography and decades-spanning career as a critic, director, and producer.
Widely influential in France, where his production company, Diagonale, operated with a revolutionary focus on female and queer filmmakers, much of his work has yet to be distributed and appraised with matched acclaim in America. He released Les ruses du diable (Neuf portraits d’une jeune fille) prior to THE STRANGLER, and followed that with his most well-known feature, Femmes femmes, in 1974. In the later part of his career, Vecchiali’s work is marked for its experimental direction and exploration of queer themes that were still considered taboo within French cinema, most notably with Encore, which is considered the first French film to explicitly link the AIDS epidemic with homosexuality.
As a producer, Vecchiali was able to facilitate work by Liliane de Kermadec (Aloïse) and Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles), among others, and his final film, Bonjour la langue, which he co-wrote, directed, and produced prior to his death, premiered posthumously at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this month.
