Police

The French make some very fine films. They also make some really pretentious stinkers. This is of the former variety.

A very well acted and directed film. The seediness of the criminals, prostitutes, the lawyer, and the cops is very well portrayed. You do need a scorecard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in this flick. Which would appear to be exactly the response that the director, Maurice Pialat, wishes to elicit.

Sophie Marceau does a fine job portraying the beautiful but ethically and morally empty Noria. It's very evident that she's using Depardieu's character to achieve her own ends. However, Depardieu knows it too, but cannot help himself.

It's Depardieu's movie and he plays his character perfectly. A combination of arrogance, brutality, macho, humor, and vulnerability. You come to realize that for all of his violence, groping women, and swagger that on some level he is a lost innocent. In one scene where he and Noria are in a car making out, he comments that they're acting like a couple of kids. Noria responds something to the effect that that's exactly why it's so good.

The final scene is played out perfectly by the two main characters. Depardieu is perfect in portraying both anger and vulnerability. The viewer is left with a view of the tough guy left broken hearted by the beautiful but empty hearted girl. The movie is about the basic human tragedy and the grave error of living only for one's own appetites.

Very good movie. It gives the initial impression of only being a tough, French cop film. But it's really a morality play which is done in such an artful manner that you barely notice until the ending. It's also very romantic--if only in a failed sense. It appears to me to make the point that love can only live where there is honesty and a willingness to be open and vulnerable. Hence, it's inevitable death in the sordid world of the "Police".

Police is an objective appraisal of African Muslim community wherein Pialat takes us on a fantastic tour of Parisian drug dealing activities.He has vibrantly portrayed Arab world from an evenhanded French perspective by depicting individuals caught in a vortex of social context.All its characters are so vulnerable that even the slightest fantasy pays a heavy price.Pialat has acquired laudable brilliance from his leading players.Depardieu is exceptionally brilliant in his role as Inspector Mangin.Sophie Marceau is equally impressive in her role as compulsive liar Noria.She has incarnated her role with noteworthy aplomb.Police is a solemn chronicle about the interminable combat involving corrupt people on the one hand and an honest police officer like Mangin on the other hand.Police differs from other films of thriller genre by laying a good deal of emphasis on its protagonists' frame of mind.

This is the one attempt that Pialat made to do a police procedural film. The story is told of how he got Depardieu and Marceau, the two biggest stars at the time, to commit to the project, then realized he had no script. He dispatched Catherine Breillat, she of the steamy soft-core classics, to spend her nights in Belleville soaking up the atmosphere of Arab drug gangs and write a script. Of course, he hated it... But why go on. Pialat's films are such a triumph of will over circumstances (his own failings) that it is useless to analyze the making of them.

He has got Depardieu to play a detective, but somehow the character flows naturally out of Loulou, made five years previously. There is the same wildness, the same physicality, the same need to take risks. When the detectives, the hooker, the lawyer and Noria are all in the nightclub together, they are all risking something but they don't care much. The plot turns on a cache of drug money found in Noria's apartment, but that is just a convenience for the viewer; Pialat has a need to show us people under pressure, getting beaten, getting shot, spending time in prison and so forth.

Reality intrudes on fiction: Frank Karaoui--who has several scenes as a restaurant owner and drug dealer--was convicted of dealing in real life.

This definitely isn't the most exciting movie about law enforcement (it took me three tries to finish it because I kept falling asleep). Instead of car chases and shoot-outs it contains a lot of dialogue (some obviously improvised) and focuses mostly on the relationships between the various interesting characters. It is a kind of a police procedural, but even there it focuses on the more mundane aspects of police work that the much more famous Hollywood(and slightly more famous Italian) cop movies tend to skip over.

The whole thing wouldn't work though if it weren't for the acting. Gerard Depardieu plays one of his sympathetic anti-heroes, the kind of guy you really shouldn't like, but eventually really do. Even though she was only about 18 at the time, Sophie Marceau manages to hold her own against the great Depardieu as a potential femme fatale who is mixed up with the Tunisian drug dealers he is trying to bust. It's well known that Marceau is a "Bond girl", but it's not often mentioned that (with the possible exception of Eva Green) she's also the most TALENTED of all the "Bond girls". I was impressed with Sandrine Bonnaire for another reason. I knew she was a formidable actress from Claude Chabrol's "L'Initiation", but I had no idea how cute and sexy she was in her younger years. She has a much smaller role as a 19-year-old prostitute Depardieu's character picks up, but she handles the requisite French-movie full-frontal nude scenes both Depardieu and Marceau uncharacteristically fore-go.

The crime story here is interesting too in that both the Tunisian criminals and the cops are obviously flawed, but not unsympathetic characters. (You kind of don't want anybody to win or lose).This is kind of a slow-going flick, but ultimately it is worth it.

I don't think anybody can make films like the French. Let's all go to France and watch films. Maurice Pialat has put something together here that's like a religious experience. At the end a soaring modern aria comes on and right there in the first few notes you realize he really did trick us - it wasn't about money, lust and war but life and the common tragedy. This is a film I first saw on video about 7 years ago. It blew my mind then. Warhol had come to mind, because of the overall affectless tone, the plodding rhythm. I had found it in our local supermarket then and again last week, up for sale $3.50. No way I was going to miss it - I had blabbed about it to too many people thru the years. But I procrastinated looking at it, expecting it to be boring. I couldn't really remember much besides its tone. The schedule cleared, though, and equipped with a serious remote I chopped my way through slowly, back over the subtitles again and again catching it all. A knockout.