Polar (1984)
Directed by Jacques Bral

Film Review

A year before Jean-Luc Godard performed his merciless deconstruction of the French film policier in Détective (1985) director Jacques Bral undertook a similar exercise with Polar, his immediate follow-up to his acclaimed noir-tinted drama Extérieur, nuit (1980).  Like Godard, Bral appears to have great fun toying with the motifs and conventions of the policier genre, exaggerating the familiar archetypes and plot devices to ludicrous extremes whilst faithfully pastiching the kind of convoluted thriller nonsense that had been so spectacularly popular in France for the past two decades.  Whilst it is somewhat less intellectually challenging than Godard's film, Polar is still likely to give you a migraine if you try to follow the plot too closely - the sanest way to approach it is as a wickedly wry parody that is not intended to make sense.

The film is based on the novel Morgue pleine by the popular French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose work has frequently been adapted for French cinema - for example: Claude Chabrol's Nada (1973), Yves Boisset's Folle à tuer (1975) and Jacques Deray's Trois hommes à abattre (1980).  Bral's faithful screenwriter Jean-Paul Leca retains the mordant dark humour of Manchette's novel, as well as its labyrinthine structure and first person narration, which pays a cheeky homage to Raymond Chandler's crime novels.

The hero of the film is no resourceful Philip Marlowe but an inept bumbling depressive named Eugène Tarpon, affectionately portrayed by Jean-François Balmer.  A slovenly and lethargic near-relative of Mr Bean, Tarpon shambles dizzily from one implausible plot development to another, so totally out of his depth you wonder how he is ever going to make it to the end of the film.  Our hero is such an unexciting proposition that even the story's femme fatale (Sandra Montaigu) cannot bear to share a bed with him au naturel and fetches him a pair of pyjamas at the first opportunity.  When he is not being tormented by American-style hoodlums (one of whom bears more than a passing resemblance to David Soul), Tarpon is harangued by limpet-like police, who appear to have even less of an idea about what is going than he is.  To cap it all, he has a run in with a director of pornographic films who looks scarily like Claude Chabrol (probably because the character is played by Claude Chabrol).  The plot thickens faster than quick drying cement in an iron foundry during a heat-wave, and if you are not totally confused out of your skull by the time the credits roll you clearly haven't been paying attention.

Bral's Polar and Godard's Détective are so obviously companion pieces that it should be almost mandatory to watch them together.  It is highly significant that the two films came along at the time when the traditional French policier or polar had just about run its course and was being abandoned both by filmmakers and audiences.  (Having virtually died out in the mid-1980s, the genre would return with a vengeance two decades later.)  What  the two films by Bral and Godard do is to expose the emptiness and utterly contrived nature of the polar, to show that, once you have stripped away the conventions, there is virtually nothing left.  The phenomenal success of the genre is hard to account for if we accept that such films are nothing more than an accumulation of stock clichés, the same familiar pattern repeated ad nauseum.  Watching Bral's film makes it clear that it is not the content that is important, but rather the mise-en-scène, the unique stylisation that a film director can bring to the film.  A polar without meaningful  or original content is acceptable; one without style and flair would be unthinkable.

Film Synopsis

A disgraced cop, Eugène Tarpon, sets himself up as a private detective, operating from his one room apartment in Paris.  If Tarpon had expected a stampede of clients beating a path to his door he is soon disappointed.  He is about to give up and return to his home village when he is visited by an attractive but highly distressed young woman named Charlotte who begs him to investigate the murder of her best friend.  Reluctantly, Tarpon accepts the case but before he can reach the dead woman's apartment he is picked up by the police and questioned as the obvious suspect for her murder.  Not long after he is released by the police, Tarpon is menaced by some suspicious looking hoodlums, who abduct him and then release him for no apparent reason.  By this stage, Tarpon realises he has managed to get himself caught up in a dangerous and complex affair.  His investigation leads nowhere, until Charlotte makes an unexpected reappearance...