Our collaboration with L’Alliance New York concludes with a highlight from “The Ballad of Patrick Dewaere,” the tribute to the iconic late French actor organized by their new film curator Jake Perlin.

Claude Miller’s feature debut stars Patrick Dewaere as Marc, an athletics teacher at a summer camp in the French countryside. Opposite Dewaere is Philippe (Patrick Bouchitey), a theater instructor who stirs feelings of attraction and repulsion in Marc after he catches him in drag late one night. In sync with its summer backdrop, The Best Way to Walk unfolds in brisk fashion as Marc’s showboat machismo reveals the nastiest impulses of toxic masculinity.

Miller, who worked as an assistant director to Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard, approaches The Best Way to Walk with a trained eye, piecing together the narrative through a series of evocative scenes that draw upon the summer landscape to emphasize the heated interpersonal dynamics on view. Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten (Possession, India Song) won a César for his work on the film.

“I’ve had an abiding love for/fascination with Patrick Dewaere, sparked decades ago when first seeing Série Noire, which felt to me the ultimate of performances, untouchable among all of his contemporaries. Truly, Dewaere’s filmography has multiple pinnacles, where he can obliterate everyone who surrounds him in one moment, and surrender to them in the next. In The Best Way to Walk, Dewaere plays off Patrick Bouchitey and Christine Pascal, a mixture of ferociousness and delicacy, all the while behaving despicably. It is also an unexpectedly perfect partnership with Claude Miller, who despite making numerous excellent films, like Garde a vue, and who achieved some popular success in the United States, is not much discussed or screened today.  This film, shot by Bruno Nuytten, was Miller’s feature debut, and calls for a reconsideration of his work.” JAKE PERLIN

Progressive in its day, Miller’s frank depiction of anti-LGTBQ sentiment in an all-male environment falls in line with similar concerns he attended to over the course of his career. In 2002, he told IndieWire that he wanted to address “cruelty, of people toward each other, as well as class and social inequities” in his films. This attention to injustice persisted throughout his career on the heels of The Best Way to Walk’s sensitive filmmaking.

Claude Miller was born in Paris, France, in 1942. He studied film at IDHEC and worked as an assistant director to Marcel Carné, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Demy early in his career. After making a series of short films, Miller directed The Best Way to Walk, which earned him several César nominations. His subsequent films ranged across genres, but often involved narratives about crime, sex, and working-class communities. Later in his career, Miller became the President of L’ARP, a French film guild dedicated to defending the economic and moral interests of filmmakers and producers.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Jake Perlin and Chloe Dheu at L’Alliance New York, as well as Nicholas Elliot for his sharp writing on the film, which served as a guidepost for our program notes.

© Les Films de la Boissière – LCJ Editions et Productions 2025.