Si j'étais un espion (1967)
Directed by Bertrand Blier

Film Review

Seven years before he scored a critical and commercial hit with Les Valseuses (1974), director Bertrand Blier made his feature debut with an idiosyncratic little film that - inexplicably - has been all but forgotten.  Si j'étais un espion (Breakdown) is a minimalist spy thriller that fits more comfortably into John le Carré's crepuscular world of shadowy secret agents than the warped universe in which Blier indulges his fascination for gender identity and sexual morality.  Blier made the film at a time when the spy movie was at the height of its popularity, but he steered clear of the genre's now tired conventions (guns, girls and gadgets, à la James Bond) and instead takes us into something far closer to the reality of modern day espionage.  It's a strange and subtly disturbing film that looks as if Joseph Kafka and Harold Pinter both had a hand in its creation.

The spy thriller was a genre that Blier had some experience of, having worked as an assistant on Georges Lautner's Le Monocle noir (1961).  He began his directing career with two short films, Hitler, connais pas (1963) and La Grimace (1966), before taking the plunge with his first feature Si j'étais un espion, with his father, the illustrious screen actor Bernard Blier, in the central role.  The film's poor reception led Blier fils to abandon filmmaking and to instead forge a career as a writer.  Ironically, it was by adapting his best-selling novel Les Valseuses that he made his name as a director and rapidly became one of French cinema's most esteemed auteurs.

Si j'étais un espion is unlike any film that Bertrand Blier would subsequently make, yet, running through it, there is that unmistakable sense of absurdity which permeates all of his other work.  Of Blier's better known films, the one it most calls to mind is Buffet froid (1979), a bleak existential comedy in which Blier senior also crops up, in a not-too-dissimilar role.  In his son's first feature, Bernard Blier plays a timid Mr Everyman (a doctor by trade) who gets himself lured into the murky world of political espionage by accident (or so we are led to think).  Blier is so convincing in the role that we never doubt for a second that he is an innocent victim enmeshed in a Kafkaesque intrigue, whilst the man who hassles him - a superbly sinister Bruno Cremer - is clearly a lifelong habitué of the netherworld of espionage.

In the course of the film, the roles of the lead characters are partially reversed - Cremer becomes more sympathetic and human, Blier more ambiguous and distant, and what fascinates most is the strange relationship that develops between the two men as they each attempt to unravel the other's identity.  Throughout, there is an uneasy sense that both men are pawns in a far bigger game, manipulated and controlled by invisible forces in a way that anticipates the cynical néo-polars of the following decade.  Darkly compelling, Si j'étais un espion deserves to be considered one of Bertrand Blier's more inspired works, not one that lies forgotten in the shadows.

Film Synopsis

Dr Lefèvre is a widower who leads a peaceful life with his daughter Sylvie in the suburbs of Paris.  One evening, he is called to visit one of his patients, a depressive named Guérin, but gets no reply when he rings the doorbell.  A short while later, Lefèvre is lured into an empty apartment where two strangers try, unsuccessfully, to extract from him Guérin's new address.  When he returns home, Lefèvre finds another man, Matras, going through his collection of holiday photos.  Matras is interested in Lefèvre's recent visit to Warsaw, where he first made contact with Guérin.  Realising that his daughter's life may be in danger, Lefèvre has no choice but to cooperate, not knowing whether Matras is a secret service agent or a gangster...