Drug war nostalgia

There's nobody as vivid as Gene Hackman's "Popeye" Doyle or action as good as the car chase sequence with Gene Hackman in the 1971 French Connection, but Cédric Jiminez's retro policier, set in 1975, deals with the actual French side of the French Connection referred to by William Friedkin's classic. It depicts a newly appointed Marseille investigator with crusading zeal called Pierre Michel. In a change of pace for him, Michel is played by The Artist's and the droll OSS 117 spoofs' Jean Dujardin. Michel's aim, which takes all he's got, is to destroy drug lord Gaëtan 'Tany' Zampa (Gilles Lellouche). This is an epic struggle, and though in an overstated effort at parallelism, Dujardin and Lellouche look a little too alike for my taste, there are many impressive scenes. There's also some dragged-out suspense that might have benefitted by tighter editing. Despite an implied reference to Jean-Pierre Melville right at the beginning, and similarities to a number of French gangster flicks and considerable ambition, The Connection/La French is at best a good mid-range effort, similar to Olivier Marechal's flavorful genre film A Gang Story/Les Lyonais (R-V 2012), which has more fully realized gangsters. Neither of these can compete either with the adept recent French crime movies like Tell No One (or Audiard's epic gangster coming-of-ager A Prophet, not to mention his Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped) or with French polar noir classics like Rififi-- or anything by Melville. It doesn't have the drive or the neat structure or the cool. Above all, with its over-active cutting and jumpy camerawork, it lacks the cool.

The festival blurb calls her "luminous," but Céline Sallette, who plays Michel's beleagered and occasionally complaining wife, quite lacks the glamor she had in Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures, and as a pivotal but in screen time relatively minor character "Le Fou," Benoît Magimel is wasted. Don't get me wrong: this is a well-made film. But it has some tough acts to follow, and it offers little that is new, beyond a gangster's disco called "Krypton" opened by the cocky Zampa (to please his wife: it loses him money) and the music to go with it.

In his Toronto review for Variety Peter Debruge comments that this "manages to be both more upbeat and more cynical than William Friedkin’s loosely fictionalized policier." He also notes this film's "disappointingly generic approach" and "hard-to-follow narrative." For this one must blame Jimenez's screenwriter, his fiancée Audrey Diwan.

The cynicism comes in revelations about how the drug cartel has thoroughly infiltrated police and local government from top to bottom. Michel is bucked every step of the way, till Mitterand's rise to power and appointment of Marseille's mayor to a key government post causes the latter to turn reformist and back up Michel's effort to find out who the leading figures are and trap hem in their heroin-producing lairs.

There is good material here surely, but it needed to be pared down into something leaner and meaner. Debruge's review may be consulted for further examples of the various ways that Jimenez's attempt at an American gangster movie falls too much into obvious and repetitious genre conventionality.

The Connection/La French, 135 mins., debuted at Toronto; showed at a few other festivals. French release 3 December 2014, AlloCiné press rating 3.7. Screened for this review as part of the UniFrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 2015 (US premiere). A US theatrical release by Drafthouse begins 15 May 2015 (at Landmark Theaters).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.