Police (1985)
Directed by Maurice Pialat

Film Review

Maurice Pialat is probably the film director who is least likely to direct a genre film.  Yet, having established himself as the quintessential auteur filmmaker with such works as L'Enfance nue (1968), Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972), La Gueule ouverte (1974) and Loulou (1980), Pialat allowed himself to be tempted into making a policier with all the resources he could expect for a mainstream film production.  Whilst it has all the elements of the classic French crime film, Police was a world apart from the majority of such films at the time, far more concerned with character than plot and with a brutally naturalistic feel that makes it nearer to a fly-on-the-wall documentary than a conventional piece of drama.  The opening titles are reduced to a single caption with the film's title, shown for a just a few seconds, and the only music Pialat employs comes right at the end, as the film segues poignantly into its closing credits.  Pialat's relentless striving for authenticity enabled him to deliver one of the most striking French crime films of the 1980s, one that injected realism into a tired and formulaic genre, presaging the emergence of a new, far more prosaic and authentic kind of policier in the following decade.

Police was Maurice Pialat's most commercially successful film.  It attracted an audience of 1.8 million in France and was critically acclaimed both in France and on its international release.  Today, many regard it as the director's best film, certainly his most influential.  Yet Pialat loathed the film (perhaps because of its success and the unwanted attention it brought him).  It was also a highly uncomfortable production for just about everyone who worked on it.   It was Catherine Breillat (later to become an important filmmaker in her own right) who originated the project.  She produced the first draft of the script and was instrumental in getting Pialat to direct it.  But, once production was underway, Breillat and Pialat soon fell out over their differences about the film's content and style.  Pialat's relationships with his actors were even more strained and left some of them with extremely bitter memories.

Sandrine Bonnaire, who had worked successfully with Pialat on his previous film, À nos amours (1983), was relegated to a minor part to punish her for not being as available as the director wished.  Pialat found it virtually impossible to communicate with Sophie Marceau, and conspired with his lead actor Gérard Depardieu to upset her so much that she would naturally give the reactions he wanted her to show (a good example of this being the scene in which Mangin interrogates Noria, subjecting her to a relentless barrage of physical and psychological abuse).  Richard Anconina suffered the most - Pialat appeared to have no faith in his abilities whatsoever and on one occasion publicly humiliated him on set in front of the entire cast and crew, bringing the production to a complete standstill as he did so.  Pialat was the hardest of taskmasters but his severity and unwillingness to compromise are amply vindicated in the end result.  Marceau, Depardieu and Anconina have rarely, if ever, given more convincing performances than those that Pialat extracted from them for Police.

In contrast to most crime dramas, which rely perhaps a little too much on sensationalist plot developments to maintain the spectator's attention, Police focuses exclusively on the characters, and this is what makes it so fiercely compelling.  The plot, what there is of it, exists merely to drive the characters and allow the film's authors to explore the complex symbiotic relationship that exists between law enforcers, lawyers and criminals.  Much of the film is concerned with the routine drudgery of police work, so that we end up with the impression that the life of a police officer is much like any other - dull, repetitive routine punctuated by occasional moments of drama.  It is possible that the real reason Pialat disliked the film was because it presented him with constraints that he knew he could not get around and which conflicted with his auteur approach to filmmaking.  The crime drama offers considerable versatility but it still boils down to a a pretty well-defined formula, and to depart too far from this would doubtless have been deemed gratuitous.  The most remarkable thing about Police is that, whilst it is recognisably a French policier in the traditional mould, it is also something radically different, a precursor of the grittier, more character-centric crime films that were to come in the 1990s and beyond.

Film Synopsis

Based in an ordinary police station in Paris, Mangin is a driven police inspector who is on a personal crusade to smash a ring of drugs traffickers that is operating between Marseille and Paris.  His methods are crude and somewhat brutal but they tend to get results - most of the time.  By putting pressure on his informants, he manages to scrape together just enough evidence to arrest a small time drugs pusher, Simon Slimane, in the hope that the latter will betray his brothers Jean and Maxime, who are the ones running the drugs trafficking ring.  With Simon proving reluctant to talk, Mangin turns his attention to his girlfriend Noria, but she is just as uncooperative.

A lawyer and old friend of the inspector, Lambert, advises the fixated Mangin to release Simon, but he refuses and redoubles his efforts to extract the truth from Noria.  As he does so, Mangin finds himself being powerfully attracted to the spirited young woman.  So intense do his feelings for Noria become that he begins to completely lose interest in his police work.  An intelligent and fiercely independent woman, Noria is not slow to take advantage of the cop's infatuation with her.  Leading Mangin to believe she is attracted to him, she plans her escape, hoping to start a new life with the traffickers' ill-gotten gains...