Petite Mort
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'Part Moulin Rouge, part Alfred Hitchcock' Grazia
'A sly, erotic thriller concerned with doubleness and duplicity' Guardian
Mesdames et Messieurs, presenting La Petite Mort, or, A Little Death ...
A silent film, destroyed in a fire in 1914 at the Pathé studio, before it was seen even by its director.
A lowly seamstress, who makes the costumes she should be wearing, but believes her talent - and the secret she keeps - will soon get her a dressing room of her own.
A famous and dashing creator of spectacular cinematic illusions - husband to a beautiful, volatile actress, the most adored icon of the Parisian studios.
All fit together, like scenes in a movie. One with a twist that will leave you breathless ...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in the U.K. in 2013 and adapted as a BBC Radio 4 serial starring Honor Blackman, Hitchman's dazzling debut, a thriller that spans seven decades, offers insights into early Parisian film making and the amoral glitterati who brought it to dizzying life. Ad le Roux starred in Petite Mort, a 1914 silent film that was believed destroyed in a fire at the Path factory before it could be distributed. Ad le's involvement in a murder case later that year ensured that the film was not reshot. Provocative snippets of the actress's titillating memoirs, told in her old age to journalist Juliette Blanc, chronicle her passionate affairs with seductive special-effects inventor Andr Durand and his ravishing and sinister actress wife, Luce. The memoir's chilling glimpses of the leading characters' precociously lethal early lives counterpoint the 1967 rediscovery of the lost film with one crucial scene missing. Hitchman juxtaposes love and lust, unquenchable desire and pangs of self-revulsion, in this scorching expos of ambition so ferocious it drives souls into hells of their own making.
