Undercover - L'infiltrato

A very nice piece. Slow deliberate and moody. It shows that supercops dealing with the drug situation in France sometimes are as crooked devious and profoundly criminal as the guys they are going after.

It shows a writer from Libération The left-leaning main newspaper in France the equivalent of The Guardian in England working together with a former informer and gathering information on one of the leading supercops.

The film is shot in what could be described as cinéma vérité or reportage and the sound quality is very poor throughout most of the piece. In fact the only way I could follow most of the dialogue was to watch the film with headphones and even then there were segments I could not catch.

It also has a quality in the filmmaking in the scenes which are presented which is kind of "décousu "(unstitched) by which one means it does not always obviously make sense why a scene stops and another one starts. One could almost see ripples from the 60s Nouvelle Vague in this presentation; style of delivery ....

All the same it holds together pretty well in the end. The final scene sort of a denouement in the courthouse is very cleverly presented and the main actor Vincent Lindon does a very good impersonation of a man who thinks himself whiter than white when it is clear that he is anything but.

The actor who plays the journalist also presents himself in a way that is plausible slightly weak a tad shallow and it is not always clear why the character is doing what he's doing.

All in all I would call this piece original in an interesting way. There are now so many films about drug trafficking drug Enforcement and they tread The same territory , This one displays a certain level of true originality in the way it is presented and for that only I would recommend it.

If the producers of this film have added more action scenes, I would have the feeling to watch a movie made by Cedric Gimenez, the director of BAC NORD, NOVEMBRE or LA FRENCH; thrillers related to actual events, sensible matters, media oriented "hot" topics. Here it is not question of terrorism, nor rogue, borderline cops, but the involvement of the French government with Spanish authorities and their criminal spooks to get rid of Basque independance fighter, some kind of terrorists but only in Spain or south West of France; nothing to do with ISIS..And especially a story about the way that French police uses illegal ways to get rid of drug traffic. Useless to say that this movie is not a crime film for me, but a kind of documentary, false documentary, well explained, factual, told in a journalistic way. The director Thierry De Peretti is a Corsican film maker who seems to make the same kind of cinema as Cedric Gimenez, and it is not surprising that one of his previous films was a feature speaking of Corsican separatists and their bloody relations with the underworld and their violent problems with also the French authorities: UNE VIE VIOLENTE. Cedric Gimenez without testosterone. A good movie, interesting to watch, but only if you are interested in this topic, if not forget it. Vincent Lindon is as excellent in this film as he is in Stéphane Brizé's social movies: LA LOI DU MARCHE, EN GUERRE, UN AUTRE MONDE. Anyway Vincent Lindon is excellent EVERYWHERE.

All the professional critics greatly appreciated this movie with its most demanding script when you want it to bring out all its strength, with a magnificent cast in their individual interpretations. A movie noir that smells full of the truth hidden in these most important circles of the State. I loved this movie pure and hard at the same time.