Police

I have to put in a good word for this highly accomplished movie by a great French director.

Where it falters is in its latter preoccupation with the love story between anti-hero mysoginist cop Gerard Depardieu and damaged femme fatale Sophie Marceau. The dialogue here verges on the melodramatic - 'I knew one day you would leave me' etc. (Or is it just badly written subtitles?)

Brilliant, though, is Pialat's portrayal of the macho, violent world of the Paris police station in which most of the action takes place, as well as the various seedy clubs and bars the police and their drug dealing quarry frequent. These policemen, criminals, and lawyers seem at times all to be part of the same gang - enjoying drinks with eachother one day, participating in an aggressive interrogation down at the station the next.

In the special features section of the DVD we learn that this strange milieu is based entirely on first-hand observation, some of the dialogue having been transcribed directly from real life events. It's this documentary element that lends the crime-thriller aspect of the story such a fascinating authenticity. (The realsim on display does create difficulties for a non-French-speaking audience, with much of the pacey, at times overlapping dialogue tricky to subtitle.)

The film is at its best when Pialat's gaze keeps its distance, coldly and passivley observing the antics of this all too fallible crew, leaving the audience to their own conclusions. Having said that, when his camera does draw in to focus on Depardieu and Marceau, the palpable sexual tension between these two is, at first, intoxicating.

But in the cold light of day, when the heat of their clandestine affair has faded and the camera draws in closer than ever, the film descends wierdly into romantic cliche, and we find it hard to care about these essentially heartless characters. In this light, Depardieu's final gaze, sorrowful and slightly pleading, seems almost like an admition of this failure.