(Descente aux enfers). Haiti stands in for hell, a place of steamy beaches, quaint cocktails, and death. Trying to salvage their frosty marriage, Alan (Claude Brasseur) and Lola (Sophie Marceau) head for the tropics, where the chill between them might thaw under the intense sun. Alan is a blocked mystery writer and a boozehound doggedly in descent; Lola, many years younger, is dogged by her own dire descent, an attempted rape that has left her iced over. In the throes of a bender, Alan wanders into the seamy side of Port-au-Prince looking for trouble, and trouble is more than happy to find him. Goodis’s sense that the past is inescapable is everywhere present in this slightly smarmy sojourn. And Lola’s body, like the desired manifestation of a mania, is everywhere to be seen, svelte, sweaty, and stripped. This tale of tropical trauma is told by Alan himself, who shares his drunken woes in voice-over and, like the writer he is, often with revisions.

—Steve Seid

• Written by Girod, Jean-Loup Dabadie, based on the novel The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis. Photographed by Charlie van Damme. With Claude Brasseur, Sophie Marceau, Marie Dubois, Hippolyte Girardot. (88 mins, In French with English softitles, Color, 35mm, From Cinémathèque Française)