Soon, however, this male controlling consciousness is disrupted by the woman herself, and it is her narrative the film is concerned with, a mystery in which she is an avenging detective. Just as her physical body (her diminutive is 'Elle', emphasising her objectified status) wreaks havoc on the summer-clammy small town she inhabits, so her taking over the traditional male noir role destabilises the narrative. Traditionally, the detective story is told from one reliable point of view, be it an omniscient narrator, a witness or the detective himself. Here narrative is splintered into a variety of conflicting, subjective voices, each story they tell only confirming the unlikeliness of anyone ever finding the 'real' truth.

Most detective stories are concerned with a single crime which the detached detecitve tries to solve. The first ever detective story, however, was Sophocles' play 'Oedipus Rex', in which the investigation of the crime was really into the detective's own origins and his relation to his father. Ditto this film, in which the initial crime and the detective's very existence are horribly linked. Criminal and sexual transgression become indistinguishable, and the various plot developments are driven by the grimmest of Greek tragic ironies. This interrogation of family and community, of buried secrets in the past, is given extra force by allusions to the Nazi Occupation, still a sore memory.

'Summer' is a brilliant film, but not one that is easy to like or enjoy. Its pastoral setting provokes fears of the usual middlebrow wish-fulfilment, but this is filmed here with an almost ugly flatness. The presence of Edith Scob in a minor role and a fairground barrel-organ leitmotif might remind us of Franju's surrealist masterpiece 'Eyes without a face', another story about a girl with father problems driven to madness, and the film has references to sleepwalking and nightmares.