Movie Review: Diabolically Yours, Starring Alain Delon and Senta Berger, Directed by Julien Duvivier (1967)

The Blu-Ray cover of Diabolically Yours, 1967. That eyebrow, tho.

Alain Delon and Senta Berger make a gorgeous couple in Diabolically Yours, 1967.

Gorgeous Senta Berger and handsome Alain Delon.

"Do I still look devastatingly handsome?"

The 1967 French thriller Diabolically Yours was the last movie of acclaimed director Julien Duvivier, who died in October of 1967, just two months before Diabolically Yours was released. Diabolically Yours stars French actor Alain Delon and Austrian-German actress Senta Berger, and together they make a gorgeous screen couple.

Diabolically Yours follows Delon as he wakes up in the hospital after a car crash. Delon has amnesia, and when Berger arrives at the hospital and says she’s his wife, he doesn’t remember her. (Don’t worry ladies, the crash didn’t affect Delon’s handsome face.) Berger takes Delon back to their fantastically huge house, and he tries to recover his memory. But is everything as straightforward as it seems? Who exactly is Kim the butler, who seems fixated on Berger? (Kim is perfectly played by Peter Mosbacher.) And what about Delon’s friend and doctor Frederic, who is always hanging around? (Expertly essayed by Sergio Fantoni.)

The performances in the movie are all excellent. Delon can convey so much emotion with just a glance, and Fantoni and Mosbacher give their supporting roles just the right touch of creepiness. Senta Berger is excellent, and she looks gorgeous in all the many costumes she wears throughout the film. The costume designer did a terrific job, as both Berger and Delon look fantastic—notice how Delon’s robe matches his blue eyes. Delon always looks handsome, of course, and he looks very sharp in the scenes where he’s wearing all black. Delon and Berger look so good together that I could watch a movie called Alain Delon and Senta Berger Watch Paint Dry in 1967.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but after watching the movie, I wondered if it might have been improved if the big reveals at the end had instead been revealed to the audience at the beginning of the movie? Obviously, you’d have to change the structure of the movie, but I think you could still create suspense and tension doing so.

Diabolically Yours was released in France at the end of 1967, just two months after his iconic performance in Le Samourai. Diabolically Yours isn’t a masterpiece on the level of Le Samourai, but it’s still an entertaining and stylish film.

Book Review: We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, by Simu Liu (2022)

 

The cover of We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, by Simu Liu, 2022, plus a handsome headshot of Liu. 

The excellent cast of the CBC sitcom Kim's Convenience. From left to right, Simu Liu, Jean Yoon, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Andrea Bang, Andrew Phung, and Nicole Power.

Actor Simu Liu has rocketed to fame over the past few years, thanks to his role as Jung Kim on the CBC hit TV show Kim’s Convenience, and his groundbreaking lead role as Shang-Chi in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Liu is now the author of a memoir, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, which tells the story of his parents, who were born in China and immigrated to Canada in the early 1990’s.

Liu’s parents were both engineers, and they placed high expectations on him to follow a similar career path. However, from an early age, Liu had the feeling that he might be better suited to a more creative career. Much of We Were Dreamers focuses on Liu’s relationship with his parents, which turned abusive turning his teenage years.

Liu is an excellent writer, and he is honest about his own shortcomings as he chronicles his journey through a private high school and on to college, where he majors in business with the hopes of becoming an accountant. But the acting bug bites, and when Liu is fired from his accounting job in 2012, he jumps into acting, working as an extra, stock photo model, and stuntman—anything to gain experience.

Getting cast in Kim’s Convenience in 2016 was Liu’s big break as an actor. I would have liked more tidbits about Kim’s Convenience, as the show was my introduction to Liu, but he makes it clear that while he appreciated the show, he had his eyes set on making it big in Hollywood. Even after the success of Kim’s Convenience on Netflix, it was a struggle for Liu to break into American movies. That all changed in the summer of 2019, when Liu was cast as Shang-Chi, the first Asian superhero in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.

Unfortunately, Kim’s Convenience fizzled out, and the show was canceled in 2021, due in part to the departure of Ins Choi, who wrote the play that the show was based upon. Cast members, including Liu, were vocal about how the show minimized their creative input, and criticized the shows’ lack of Asian writers. It was an unfortunate ending for a show that was groundbreaking, and in the beginning, quite funny and touching. But the last two seasons of the show were marred by a decision to lean into typical sitcom cheesiness, and as Liu writes, “story lines that didn’t carry past a singular episode.” (p.258) One of my pet peeves during the final two seasons was how Janet’s character seemed to change arbitrarily from week to week, for seemingly no reason. 

We Were Dreamers is an excellent book, as Liu details the struggles of being an Asian-American actor at a time when Asian representation in the US media is still shockingly low. I wish Liu wrote more about Kim’s Convenience, and I wish he wrote more about how his relationship with his parents has changed and improved over the years, but those are small quibbles. For anyone interested in Simu Liu’s rapid rise to stardom, or about what it’s like to be the child of immigrants, We Were Dreamers is a must-read.