Malevil (1981)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) Fans of post-apocalyptic movies will not find anything new in Malevil — a group of survivors fending off for themselves in a world decimated by a nuclear war… yeah, we’ve seen that before. On the other hand, the film is made with a decidedly very French atmosphere, as it takes place in a small town where the few survivors were assembled in a blast-resistant castle cellar during the atomic explosions. Never mind the overly glum take on nuclear war (a rural French town is exactly the kind of place that would be largely spared by the immediate effects of a Cold War nuclear exchange — I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt a lot from fallout, nuclear winter and overall breakdown of French infrastructure, but it would not wake up to a lunar landscape) — there is something interesting in seeing even a conventional post-apocalyptic story play out with French accents against the small-town backdrop. This difference aside, there isn’t much here that hasn’t already been seen elsewhere: questions of rebuilding and confrontations with other groups of survivors. I’m not a big fan of the ambiguous ending, where an official rescue is not really shown as an improvement (hence our smartest characters taking an alternative) but writer-director Christian de Chalonge apparently made the film quite a step more optimistic than the original novel. Malevil is not that worthwhile a movie, but it does have some flavour to go along with its stock premise.