Cap Canaille

Ten years after the death of Jean-Pierre Melville, that occured in 1973, with this film, you can see that the French crime film industry was also dead. There was Jean-Claude Missiaen who tried to bring some new "fresh air" between 1982 and 1984, but with only three films, it was no enough. This one is totally forgettable but not that trash either. We never know where this story leads to, you wonder all the time what it is exactly about. It's a total mess, only the Marseilles and South of France atmosphere can enjoy some viewers. It is boring but bearable. I appreciate the ending though. That's all, nothing else.

A film that stinks of amateurism. The dialogues are silly and pretentious, the actors, however good they are otherwise, are here very bad, left to their own devices by the absence of a real director able to directing them and also by the lack of script, they don't play their roles but they declast without believing the stupid texts that have been written to them, even worse, most don't even bother to articulate and others have a strong unintelligible accent. I suspect that half of the cast is made up of casual non-professional actors who have been recruited locally for a bite of bread for lack of budget. It made me feel sorry for Bernadette Lafont, because even if she does better than everyone else because of her ability to find the right tone in improvisation, being in this insipid turnip can only tarnish her image. It is only two positive points in this film: in 1, the city of Marseille that is traversed, visited and magnified, and in 2, the haunting music of Elisabeth Wiener who comes in waves as if to erase all the fads that have been debited by the protagonists.