Film Review
There's a distinctly retro feel to
Une
nuit (a.k.a.
Paris by Night),
a film that is so evocative of the classic 1970s French policier that
you half-expect Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo or Lino Ventura to turn
up at any moment and remind us that there's more to being a cop
than having a designer hairstyle and an unerring knack of surviving
gore-splattered shoot outs. Since its belated revival in the late
1990s, the policier has undergone the mother of all makeovers, becoming
increasingly stylised, increasingly violent, and far more preoccupied
with plot and making a visual splash than character depth.
Une nuit bucks this depressing
trend and offers a more authentic kind of crime drama, one that has
far more in common with the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques
Deray than today's ever more formulaic shoot 'em up action flicks.
There are no set piece shoots outs and car chases in this film, just an
absorbing study of a solitary cop going about his business one night in
the seedier precincts of Paris.
Until he made this film (in his 69th year), Philippe Lefebvre had had a
fairly undistinguished career as a director. Prior to this, he
directed only two films for the cinema -
Le Juge (1984) and
Le Transfuge (1985) - two routine
thrillers that once seen are soon forgotten. For most of his
career, Lefebvre has worked for French television, his best known work
being on the television series
Antoine
Rives, juge du terrorisme (1993) and
L'Avocate (1996). Coming 27
years after his last cinematic venture,
Une nuit is Lefebvre's most
inspired and ambitious work. Excelling on both the directing and
acting fronts, it is easily the most striking example of French film
noir since Fred Cavaye's
A bout portant (2010).
It may be a very traditional kind of film, but it has immense appeal
and exposes the vacuity of most of today's thrillers, showing that it
is possible to make a compelling crime drama without resorting to
over-the-top mise-en-scène and extravagant set pieces.
This is a policier for grown-ups.
The most striking aspect of
Une Nuit
is its near-documentary hyper-realism, which comes partly from the way
it is filmed (with a mobile HD camera which follows the main
protagonist around Paris, a bit like a fly-on-the-walk documentary),
but also from the meticulous attention to detail in its script.
The film owes much of its authentic feel to the writing team of Simon
Michaël and Philippe Isard, who were both police officers in
France before they turned their hand to screenwriting. Isard is
certainly well-placed to script the film, having spent 15 years doing
the job that Roschdy Zem's character does in the film, which is to
police criminal activity on the less salubrious streets of Paris after
dark. Prior to this film, Isard worked with Olivier Marchal
(another ex-cop, turned filmmaker) on the popular French crime series
Flics (2008). Simon
Michaël began his screenwriting career back in the mid-1980s when
Claude Zidi hired him to co-script the
Ripoux films; since, he has
worked on several of Zidi's films, and also a number of films with
Pierre Jolivet, including
Ma petite entreprise (1999).
Roschdy Zem and Sara Forestier make an effective contrast as the two
central characters in the drama, the seemingly ill-matched police duo
Weiss and Deray - the former a jaded, somewhat ambiguous lone lawman
who has grown to accept the limitations of his role; the latter a
rookie cop who is full of ideals and has yet to become accustomed to
the uglier side of Parisian life. Weiss is a contradictory
character of the kind that thrived in the French polars of the 1970s
and 80s, an inherently noble character who has become tainted by the
environment in which he works. He takes pay-offs, is on good
terms with the mobsters, but he is committed to upholding the rule of
law as far as he can - not an easy task as his superiors are apt to be
as corrupt and devious as the hoodlums and pimps he has to deal with on
the streets. Zem's portrayal appears to have been modelled partly
on Clint Eastwood's maverick lawman Harry Callahan and partly on Alain
Delon's central character in Melville's
Un flic (1972) - there is an
uncompromising toughness fused with a cool sense of detachment.
There is also a touch of the old Gabin patriarch - Weiss is not a man
who is easily intimidated, and he knows how to fight his corner and
win. Unfortunately, as was prevalent in the neo-polars of the
late 1970s (for example
Le Juge Fayard dit Le Shériff),
our hero is up against threats from many directions and it is not
immediately apparent who the greatest opponent is.
The film is as much about the Parisian demi-monde as it is about the
lawman who is tasked with overseeing it. It shows a side of the
French capital that few of us ever get to see, a festering dung heap
inhabited by dodgy nightclub owners, drugs pushers, prostitutes,
strippers and transvestites, all living precariously on the edge of
what is legally permissible. It is this diseased, maggot-ridden
underbelly of French society that Weiss must patrol nightly, and no
wonder the stench of corruption has transferred itself to him, causing
his colleagues to believe he has gone rotten himself. It is the
most unflattering and evocative depiction of Paris since Melville's
Bob
le Flambeur (1955), but, as in that film, there is something
intrinsically alluring in the lurid hedonistic dreamscape that
cinematographer Jérôme Alméras presents us with.
If
Une nuit has a fault it is
that it tries to cram far too many unlikely incidents into too short a
space of time (remember that the entire action of the film is supposed
to take place over one night). If what the film presents is
typical of what your average French cop has to face in one day's work,
you'd be surprised if there were any police officers left in France -
most of them would have taken early retirement by now and turned their
hand to something else (like writing, directing or acting in films, for instance). A few
heart-stopping dramatic incidents would not have harmed the film's
credibility too much, but a whole slew of them in quick succession does
tend to undermine its realism somewhat. Perhaps this is being
picky, since in every other respect
Une
nuit is an extremely impressive piece of cinema, and a very
welcome departure from today's more comicbook style of policier.
Late in his career, Philippe Lefebvre proves himself to be a worthy
disciple of the great Jean-Pierre Melville and delivers what is
assuredly the most compelling and distinctive French crime film of 2012.
© James Travers 2012
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