Thoughts from the committee
For three decades, Alain Delon was considered the leading light of French acting, with credits in the classic works of Godard, Varda, Melville, Antonioni and Visconti. After he passed away in late 2024, his films continue to inspire and entertain, and we memorialise him here with one of his most unusual and intriguing films.
A stylish blend of Riviera noir and gothic melodrama, Joy House stars Delon as Marc, a petty criminal on the run who hides in a villa run by two enigmatic women (Jane Fonda and Lola Albright). What seems like a refuge quickly becomes a trap, as Marc finds himself the manipulated object of a perverse power game. Unlike Clément’s elegant 1960 film Purple Noon, also starring Delon, this film is claustrophobic, mannered, and visually distorted, embodying the international “Euro‑pudding” cinema of the 1960s.
The film flips the traditional male gaze, turning Delon into an erotic object confined by the villa’s “architecture of oppression” – nets, mirrors, and fisheye distortions that turn the house into a character. Based on the novel by the same name, the story culminates in a cynical twist that dismantles classic noir heroics. Initially dismissed by critics, the film has since been reclaimed as a cult oddity and a precursor to Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, with its themes of identity, confinement, and predatory domestic power.
“[The middle act of the film] is fun: all sidelong glances, slitherings about, non sequiturs of both dialogue and action.” – Joan Didion, Vogue