Série noire (1979)
Directed by Alain Corneau

Film Review

Like all visual arts, cinema is fundamentally a medium of contrasts.  Just as a cinematographer will use light and shade to create atmosphere, so screenwriters combine comedy and drama to emphasise the contrasting facets of human nature.  We like to think we can distinguish comedy from drama, but there are situations when the two overlap to such a degree that we cannot tell them apart.  A perfect example of this is Alain Corneau's film Série noire, a bizarre conflation of film noir and theatre of the absurd which is both comical (in the blackest sense of the term) and deeply unsettling.   With its portrayal of a man sliding inexorably into insanity, Série noire is a hard film to watch if you take it too seriously, but if you try to watch it as a comedy it somehow manages to feel even more disturbing.  It is as if we can no longer distinguish black from white.

This was Alain Corneau's fourth full-length film and came straight after two popular but pretty conventional thrillers - Police Python 357 (1976) and La Menace (1977).  For both of these films, Corneau was heavily influenced by contemporary American thrillers, notably the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry films for Police Python 357.  Série noire was adapted from a pulp fiction crime novel entitled A Hell of a woman by the American writer Jim Thompson and has one obvious cinema reference: Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).  As in Scorsese's film, the main protagonist of Série noire (a clueless door-to-door salesman named Franck) is one of life's losers, someone who lives a mediocre existence on the dark fringes of society and whose reason is slowly but surely coming apart at the seams.  (The most overt reference to Taxi Driver is the scene in which, having casually asphyxiated his wife, Franck looks into the bathroom mirror and disapprovingly utters a variant on De Niro's famous 'You talkin' to me?' line.)  Série noire is one of the few films that can match Taxi Driver in its unremitting bleakness and harrowing portrayal of mental derangement.

The world that Série noire projects us into is one that could hardly be more depressing - a dull post-industrial landscape in which money is as scarce as charm, where mud brown is the colour scheme of choice for every home and office, and where all of the nobler human qualities have somehow been totally eradicated.  The main character, Franck, is as dismal as the world he inhabits, a pathetic individual who suffers from Tourette's syndrome and who is constantly hassled by his exploitative boss and domineering wife.  Franck's life is one of abject vacuity, until the day he meets Mona, a young prostitute with whom he forms an instant emotional bond.  Like Franck, Mona is trapped in a horribly empty world from which she cannot escape.  A victim of autism, she has difficulty communicating with others and lives under the thumb of her mean old aunt.  Mona is the unlikeliest femme fatale, but that is the role she fulfils for the wretched Franck - she offers the prospect of escape (via an unexpected windfall) but ends up driving him to his doom, in the best and grisliest tradition of film noir.

The character of Franck Poupart looks suspiciously as if it was created for Patrick Dewaere, an actor renowned for playing sympathetic grotesques who live either on the cusp of insanity or else at the limit of their passions.  Needless to say, the part of Franck fits Dewaere like a glove and the actor throws everything he has into it - one minute he is head-butting a stationary car, the next he is calmly drowning himself in a bath.  His tirades are like battlefield barrages and his monologues are scarier than the scariest scene in Psycho.  You'd almost think Dewaere was trying his damnedest to get himself committed to a lunatic asylum.

And yet the odd thing is that no other character in the film seems to notice Franck's descent into insanity.  The world that surrounds him appears just as warped and emotionally disfigured.  Only Mona, bound by her autism, is aware of the change in Franck's behaviour and has sufficient compassion to try to pull him back from the brink.  In such a cold and loveless world, Franck's metamorphosis into an unhinged killer would seem to be inevitable.   People take on the character of their environment - this is presumably the message that Corneau had in mind whilst making the film.

Série noire was not only an important film for Patrick Dewaere, it was also the first film in which Marie Trintignant (the daughter of Jean-Louis) had her first significant role, as the strangely beguiling prostitute Mona.  Bernard Blier also has a strong presence, as Dewaere's seemingly omniscient boss and principal tormentor, whilst Myriam Boyer is perfect for the part of Dewaere's shrewish wife.  The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 and received five César nominations the following year, in categories that included Best Actor (Dewaere) and Best Screenplay, although (inexplicably) it failed to win a single award. 

Série noire may not have been Corneau's biggest success at the box office (it attracted an audience of 0.9 million in France, half what his next film Le Choix des armes would achieve), but it is unquestionably one of his most inspired and original films.  It offers a vision of a broken down society that is at first depressing but, on further reflection, utterly terrifying - a nightmarish reality devoid of hope and love, where human beings cannot even engage with one another at the most superficial level, and where the sane and insane are differentiated only by the number of corpses that litter their living rooms.  Has cinema ever given us a bleaker and more thought-provoking view of where we might be heading?   Série noire is an excursion into Hell.  Laugh if you dare.

Film Synopsis

Franck Poupart is a neurotic door-to-door salesman working in a run-down suburb of Paris.  His wife has just walked out on him and his employer treats him with contempt.  Franck's humdrum existence is brightened one day when he meets Mona, an attractive young prostitute suffering from acute autism.  Mona lives with an elderly aunt who, she reveals, has a hidden stash of banknotes and a revolver.  Franck suddenly has an idea.  He will kill the old woman, take her money and start a new life with Mona.  Unfortunately, Franck's luck is against him, and as the scheme unravels, so does his sanity...