A longtime resident in France, Swaim (with an M) was an American. I didn't like this film which turned me off right at the beginning with its flashy but uninteresting opening sequence of whores and street people with loud music. Swaim had researched "special brigade" Paris police for months, supposedly putting his life in danger, yet he manages to make the main cops in the film look as slimy as the bad guys in Diva -- a dumb move. Somebody said Swaim was a follower of Friedkin rather than Melville/Mann. Others say he really didn't follow anybody. This would be a virtue only if he had his own style, but I can't detect much of one. There is as much of late Melville as there is of American TV cop shows. I don't like the bright lighting, which makes the Belleville scenes look like stage sets, even though they're authentic.
That there is an illegal romance between a pimp (Philippe Léotard) and his stylish whore (Nathalie Baye) and they're both under pressure to be police informers as a result is a situation Melville could have made something good out of I'm sure, but Swaim just turns it all into brightly lit sleaze.
A police sting operation that goes wrong and turns into a traffic jam and massacre of civilians is one more thing that makes the cops -- who seem worse than the hoods -- look bad, but it provides the film's only excitement. I also liked a brief interrogation in a pinball gallery before that: there should have been more interesting, intense use of locations like that. Many times the locations seem wasted and the physical business overblown and inefficient. Just consider what Melville does with a big dirty empty bedroom in the opening of Le Samourai! In the final shootout, cops keep exposing themselves to fire in an empty building. They don't seem to have watched enough Miami Vice episodes. It's a bit hard to see how this got the César for best film in 1982 when Catherine Deneuve was president of the jury. I guess it was a bad year.
It's not that there haven't been any good French "polars noirs" since Jean-Pierre Melville or that there weren't any in the Eighties, because there have been and there were, but this just isn't one of them. It's competent but that ain't enough.
Seen on a restored print in a Netflix-issued DVD.
That there is an illegal romance between a pimp (Philippe Léotard) and his stylish whore (Nathalie Baye) and they're both under pressure to be police informers as a result is a situation Melville could have made something good out of I'm sure, but Swaim just turns it all into brightly lit sleaze.
A police sting operation that goes wrong and turns into a traffic jam and massacre of civilians is one more thing that makes the cops -- who seem worse than the hoods -- look bad, but it provides the film's only excitement. I also liked a brief interrogation in a pinball gallery before that: there should have been more interesting, intense use of locations like that. Many times the locations seem wasted and the physical business overblown and inefficient. Just consider what Melville does with a big dirty empty bedroom in the opening of Le Samourai! In the final shootout, cops keep exposing themselves to fire in an empty building. They don't seem to have watched enough Miami Vice episodes. It's a bit hard to see how this got the César for best film in 1982 when Catherine Deneuve was president of the jury. I guess it was a bad year.
It's not that there haven't been any good French "polars noirs" since Jean-Pierre Melville or that there weren't any in the Eighties, because there have been and there were, but this just isn't one of them. It's competent but that ain't enough.
Seen on a restored print in a Netflix-issued DVD.