(Literal translation: The Lady from Beyond Nowhere)
A one-hit wonder?
That is what George Langelaan appears to be here in the States.
After all, the French born Science Fiction writer is best remembered for one short story — or, at least, for the movie versions of that story.
That story was “The Fly.”
Within two years of its publication in Playboy it had been adapted to film. Two sequels followed, then, in the Eighties, David Cronenberg made his version, which was itself followed by yet another very bad sequel.
You might almost get the impression this was the only story he’d written, although he actually published several novels and quite a few short stories. Some of them were actually in English, and several of these appeared on shows like Alfred Hitchcock and Night Gallery.
He did a bit better in Europe as several adaptations of his stories appeared, including this Swiss TV movie based on one of his novels.
For one reason or another, however, he also seems to have been a favorite behind the Iron Curtain as well, with several Czech and Hungarian adaptations of his work — including at least two other versions of this same story (one of which will soon appear here)!
La Dame d’outre-nulle part starts with a young man driving up to a Nuclear plant and passing through security. He opens a secure door into an off-limits area. Moments later there is an explosion.
And when they send in men in radiation suits to discover what happened, they find a mysterious woman alive and unharmed at the center of the blast.
We then learn that weeks earlier, the young man had received a strange late-night broadcast on his TV set, from beings who had once been human. Now, however, they have a weird, immaterial existence in a space parallel to our own world.
And, naturally, he falls in love with one of them.
La Dame d’outre-nulle part gets off to a good start with a deft sequence in harsh black and white, which looks very New Wave. However, the contrast and grain are both much softer for the rest of the film. Although, by the television standards of the era it looks quite stylish, with a lot of shadows. It isn’t quite as atmospheric as the cinematography of The Outer Limits, but it looks way better than the 1962 French TV movie, Le navire étoile.
However, most of the film takes place in the young man’s living room and a few other relatively small spaces. Only the opening sequence (and a recap later on) occupy a larger space.
It looks so different that I have to wonder whether it was, in fact, shot on film, as the BBC did for most of their location shoots in that era.
The biggest problem with this film is that there just isn’t enough story to support a full-length movie. The opening flashback also gives away far too much and the ironic ending is basically spoiled as soon as we are told how these strange beings entered into their current immaterial state.
Although I’m skeptical of the supposed effects which result from an immaterial being returning to the material world.
Oh, I’ll agree that La Dame d’outre-nulle part is a pleasant little film, with a clever little story. It probably would have made a good, half-hour Twilight Zone episode.
But there just isn’t enough there to support a film nearly an hour and a half long.
Oh, well…
rivets on the poster 