A gorgeous, original hermetic homage, weak on plot

French director David Perrault's debut feature Nos héros sont morts ce soir ("Our Heros Are Dead Tonight"), a drama about masked wrestlers in France in the Sixties, is a genuine oddity mixing disparate elements. It's a homage to Tarantino that also evokes pre-Nouvelle Vague French crime films; or, the Cannes Critics' Week organizer Charles Tesson called this film "Jacques Becker filmed by Wong Kar-Wai." In some ways it's as minimalist and macho as any B picture, but it's also an art film notable for immaculate velvety black and white cinematography. The latter puts most other digital black and white films to shame both for the deep blacks (though true shadows are missing) and its many ingenious compositions. It's also surreal, and one may think of Georges Franju with the memorably flamboyant finale of a fire in wax museum storehouse where a sculpture of James Cagney melts down to nothing but the eyes while one of the main characters lies unconscious surrounded by tall thin figures draped in white sheets. Perrault is as interested in mythology and imagery as in storytelling. That's the trouble: the images are great, but there's not a compelling narrative.

Basically he has made a two-hander -- ring opponents in fixed matches, with some sinister gangsterish and slightly ghoulish manager-fixers and a couple of sad-eyed women in an atmospheric bar fitted with predictable but handsome period gimmicks -- a juke box, a pinball machine. Simon (the handsome and muscular Jean-Pierre Martins) is a pro wrestler called "The Specter" who wears a white mask. When his pal Victor (Denis Menochet, the terrified farmer at the outset of Inglourious Basterds) returns bruised but outwardly tough from service in the French Foreign Legion, Simon proposes that as a civilian job he be his adversary and wear a black mask and go by the moniker of "The Butcher of Belleville." When Victor winds up not feeling tough enough to play the scapegoat Simon suggests they secretly change masks and ring identies: but the wrestling pubic isn't so easily fooled. This is all about role-playing, masks, tough exteriors and inner softness and vulnerability.

Early on Victor gets burned with a cigarette by Tom (Yann Collette), a sadistic dandy with a sunken eye-socket and an amputated voice box brandishing cigarette in holder. This is a test of Victor's resistance and courage that he doesn't totally win. There is another enforcer, The Finn (Pascal Demolon), who menaces.

The women are Jeanne (Constance Dollé), a literary bistro keeper, and Simon's musically hip girlfriend, Anna (Alice Barnole), an early Serge Gainsbourg fan. One of several admiring English-language reviews is that of Brian Clark, who describes Tonight Our Heros Die as combining "elements of classic noir and boxing/wrestling pictures from the fifties and adding a healthy dose of distinctly French existential dread, post-colonial guilt and New Wave homage" thus crafting "a winning debut that celebrates great films of yesteryear, while still feeling unique and vital in its own right." Yes, but one doesn't get a strong feeling of anything actually happening here, amid the homages and lush digital black and white. The simple basic elements of B fight pictures of the Fifties or Sixties are therefore blended into a wax museum image that is endlessly referential and stylish, but a bit static, despite the big bulbous men bouncing off each other in the ring in a mock battle of Good against Evil and the colonial angst and cinematic nostalgia. I come back to the fact that, as Figaroscope put it in its review (quoted on Allociné, which gives the film an collective press rating of 3.5), Tonight Our Heros Die is "A handsome black and white film that lacks a solid scenario."

Nos héros sont morts ce soir, 97 mins., debuted at Cannes International Critics' Week. Screened for this review on opening day in France, 23 Oct. 2013, at MK2 Odéon in Paris, at an afternoon showing that was nearly empty, while across the street at UGC Odéon Luc Besson's The Family/Malavita, with DeNiro, also opening, a larger auditorium was packed.

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