O Declínio dos Homens

This film is full of interesting ideas. Some scenes are truly hilarious. The dialogs are witty and colloquial. The tension in the film comes not so much from the 'murder mystery' plot as from the relationship between the characters. The film tells two stories in parallel.

The first story involves the characters played by Trintignant and Kassovitz. Trintignant is an ageing drifter, with a somewhat ridiculous macho toughness, who is followed by a naive young man played by Kassovitz with plenty of good-natured smiles. Many good moments in the film come from the contrast between the two characters, for example when Trintignant tries to teach Kassovitz how to be intimidating.

The second story tells how a salesman,played by Jean Yanne, gives up his job and his wife to find the murderer of a young friend. Yanne plays the part with a kind of aggressive irony. I wish I could describe this better.

After a while the viewer understands how both stories are connected and they meet indeed in the end, in a surprising but also logical ending.

The film is a successful mixture of the witty but superficial gangster films the director's father (the celebrated Michel Audiard) used to write, and the "typical french film" with lots of psychological depth and lots of care in the display of emotions.

The very structure of the movie was original.Two apparently distinct plots .

One concerns two guys:Jean Yanne and his friend Mickey who has just been very seriously injured (gangland killing?).He is lying brain dead in a gloomy hospital and his friend keeps on talking to him.

The other one concerns two other guys:Trintignant and Kassovitz.The former spends most of his time with women -although the film has gay accents - ,the latter is a half-wit who has never sex and seems to be the pain in the neck for his mate.

This is par excellence the kind of movie the French critics love: a vague ambiguous screenplay,"deep " "meaningful" frames of mind and even pieces of information in the silent movies tradition.This is also par excellence the kind of movie which makes lots of people take to their heels when they hear about French movies.

Assets: All that concerns the first two guys is in the present tense.The adventures of the two others are a long flashback.Jean Yanne gives a strong performance as a jaded desperate man who's lost his last reason to live.On the other hand ,Trintignant overacts and,for the first time in his brilliant career ,is almost unbearable.

More pretentious than really exciting.

As a massive fan of Jacques Audiard's work in the past decade, I was eager to check out his first directorial effort, See How They Fall. It wasn't a bad film by any means, but I have to admit I was disappointed. Co-written with his frequent collaborator Alain Le Henry, based on a novel by Teri White, it tells the story of Simon (Jean Yanne), a business-card salesman who hunts down the men that shoot his cop friend Mickey. It's a far-fetched concept, this mild-mannered schlub suddenly deciding to become a pulp investigator, but the black comedy tone that Audiard gives the film make it so that a stretch of the imagination isn't hard for the audience to conjure up.

Still, the story splits it's time between Simon and the homeless wandering duo of Marx and Johnny (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz), which is one of the few mistakes that it makes. There's a lack of balance in how compelling these men are, and whenever we were spending time with Simon I found myself just wanting to see more of Marx and Johnny. The two of them set up an interesting dynamic, with Marx being the grizzled old drifter who just wants to be alone and is only looking out for himself, while Johnny is the dim-witted lad with a heart of gold who takes a shine to Marx and will do anything for him. That relationship should have been the focal point of the film, but instead we spend the majority of our time with Simon on trying to track them down, a journey that isn't particularly engaging or memorable.

Audiard has worked in the crime genre for his entire career, but in the past decade with the films Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet, he has evolved the field in a way that few others have done before. He's orchestrated fully realized worlds around deep, complex characters who walk a fine line of moral ambiguity, all conducted with his key eye for a gripping aesthetic style. See How They Fall isn't a bad film, but it's stripped of all the things that make Audiard one of the best filmmakers we have in modern cinema. The characters are quite thin for the large majority of the picture, only getting slight hints towards more layers but never being full developed, and the film is stylistically flat, despite it's best efforts. It doesn't have emotional resonance of Read My Lips, the thematic power of The Beat That My Heart Skipped or the scope of A Prophet.

There's an attempt to give it the kind of whip-flash editing structure that a lot of these independent crime films were accustomed to in the '90s, but it never really lands as strongly as some of them were able to accomplish. It's a fun little movie, with fine acting by the young Kassovitz and the veteran Trintignant, but overall there really isn't anything to set it apart and leave an impression. It's a pedestrian affair, but a mildly interesting first effort from the man who would evolve into the best crime filmmaker of the modern era.

This noir character study uses the plot only as a vehicle to explore its protagonists' world. Although it's an honest attempt and the actors do very well (Trintignant is a personal favorite anyway), the pace is too slow and tiring and the lack of action sometimes becomes evident. Sometimes words cannot generate interest by themselves.

Two veteran stars bring weight to this grimy little drama with an unusual flashback structure - along with laconic captions - which despite the gorgeous Bulle Ogier appearing fleetingly as Jean Yanne's wife has strongly if unresolved homoerotic overtones.

Yanne, who serves as the film's weary cornerstone, sports a scruffy beard that makes him resemble Akim Tamiroff, who wouldn't have been at all out of place in the grungy urban hell director Jacques Audiard makes of modern Paris.