Légitime violence

I have not watched this feature since thirty years and I absolutely wanted to see it again. I was not disappointed, although the eighties at their worst - or may I say at their best - was rather annoying to me. Because if you watch closely any french movie - for large screen or TV - you have always the same feeling in the atmosphere, acting, editing, way to handle the camera, in the production design. Every thing. I even find it in the novels written in this time. Awful. This one makes no exception. I only enjoyed the topic, typical from a screen writer like the late Jean-Patrick Manchette - the author of Nada and many other novels or screenplays for the big screen. I loved this scheme of legalized vigilante groups of law abiding citizens deciding to take in charge the application of justice. THEIR justice. And besides, because in this film you actually have TWO lines, you also have the scheme of the illegal, secret, special forces of police, the one in which the common citizen has not heard of. It actually occurred in France during the sixties and seventies before stopping in the early days of 1980 with the Auriol slaughter, in which a whole family was killed. That made an end of this organization: S.A.C: Service d'Action Civique, created in the early sixties by Charles De Gaulle to fight against O.A.S, just after war in Algeria. Well, back to this film, I was delighted to find Michel Aumont as the rotten head police officer, the "superintendant". I thought as the same character he had in NADA, originally written by Manchette and directed by Claude Chabrol, in which he played the terrific "superintendant" Goémont. His best performance ever. An evil character as I crave for.

The Police are inefficient so let's take the law in our own hands.Serge Leroy 's purpose was to denounce this attitude which became particularly threatening in the wake of the abolishment of death penalty by François Mitterrand in 1981 in France.

Unfortunately a long-winded complicated plot will not convince anybody.Besides,on many levels,Leroy offends people even if he does not mean to do it:

-The Police are all incompetent listless cowards.

-Homosexuals might resent him for making a gay nightclub a den of criminals,even if the owner (Thierry Lhermitte)is more stupid than really nasty.

-Women are also demeaned with a two bit bubble-head squalling chanteuse,Lhermitte's sister.

Actually the only nice person on the screen is Claude Brasseur's father,a sensible sensitive man who tells his son :"we've never brought you up that way!" Christophe Lambert appears in a small part.

André Cayatte had already shown how the populace could rule and take the law in its own hands in "le glaive et la balance" (1963) .Although dismissed at the time,he did a much better job than Leroy.

Anything with this great French actors, (and so young!) Lhermitte, Brasseur, Genest, Kaprisky, Lambert, Clavier and of course Aumont cannot fail, but doesn't necessarily have to succeed either.

After reading the title and reading the synopsis you may legitimately think this is a French Charles Bronson/ Van Damme/ ..., a regular guy driven by the massacre of his family to avenge them single mindedly.

Claude Brasseur being an unusual thug would only add some twist to an already too familiar formula. But French cinema always surprises us, this is not an European version of Cobra (remember, Sylvester Stalone) who fights the system in a Nietzschean, nihilistic way. Point of fact, he seems to be rather lost during this confusing movie, but that's due to a midbrow plot. He's of course very likable, thou, as he always is.

Following the genre's rules, we see a seedy Deauville, a gay bar called "the system" directed by Eddy, a classic psychopath who manipulates even his sister without flinching and who of course feels no empathy, and some glimpses to Véronique Genest's sculptural body and her singing . A customer even thinks she's a travesty :)! Eddy has only 2 faithful acolytes, the most remarkable is of course Jockey, the "sensitive one" of the two.

Everybody looks very young, the late 70s music, ambiance, decoration, hairdos (!), it only increases our feeling of "estrangement" to this unusual "big production" French movie, but that's probably not willing by the authors, just the result of them having chosen very "modern" topics and aesthetics, that of course faded fast as they grew.

What didn't wane was the rise of the far right, and French fears of it. Witness the preponderance given in this film to the group against the abolition of death penalty, a civil militia that during most of the movie talks a lot but does little. Well, they have small social gatherings, they scorn the regular police and judiciary system for being too easy on criminals (sounds familiar :)?) but it seems just a gropuscule driven by the pedophile Philippe Miller, who has his beautiful niece "Nadine" as his lover at home, is a control freak with her in public, even shows her in a bath gown to bereaving Modot.

It doesn't take much brains to figure out director Serge Leroy is making a point against the rise of the far right, as IMDb reviewer "dumonteil" so aptly writes, as always. On his review: "Leroy offends people even if he does not mean to do it". ... I'd only have liked the director being less gross. Less , well, trite.

The police fare no better, of course. Aumont plays against character, a corrupt sergeant who leads a "tired feet" policy, obviously has his own private agenda. He's got only a lonely sidekick, inspector Carducci (some day somebody will write about why the baddies, the corrupt, the coward, have Italian surnames in French movies :) ).

So we have the usual ingredients: "the world is cruel, life has no meaning (Eddy says it in the beginning of the movie), even the song's punkish lyrics 'make no sense' (sic), brainless criminals can take away what's most valued to you, your family, in a split second, the police will do nothing, or worse, will work against you and, this is the originality of the movie, the presence of this mysterious far right group, that even the cops call Nazis. Of course, nothing can be so grim and still be a major production, so we have inspector Paul Gouvion as a "lonely honest cop" in this ocean of police turpitude.

But nothing acts really as we expect it. Neither the "good cop" really does much, nor the "bad chief cop" is really all that bad, the female interest (Lucie) has only playing flippers and pool as her main "vice" (no sex, not even alcohol, in fact her tantrums look like a teenager's -of that time- rather than a thug's sister's). Brasseur's father easily convinces him that it's no good trying to kill those who destroyed you, "it's not the kind of education we gave you". Lucie has to instruct Martin how to escape the big husky thug that was about to dispose of him, and later she's the man when dealing with also physically imposing Jockey (Lambert).

If "the system" is just the name of a gay bar, and 3 criminals without much talent can kill with a machine gun on a busy train station, you may expect this film to be a 80sh version of "Falling Down" (the M. Douglas film in which a regular white collar worker finally snaps, due to 'the senseless and violence of urban life' or something like this).

Just don't expect clear cut conclusions and political correctness, and you may enjoy this film, let alone the many sociological notes hidden in the regular plot. Like (I'll only name one, you will spot others) the way people of a "midsized French city" have fun and cherish family, totally different than the classic Parisian elite we regularly have on standard French *(and American) films on "the French".

Enjoy!