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36
DIR: Olivier Marchal • WRI: Dominique
Loiseau, Frank Mancuso, Olivier Marchal, Julien Rappeneau •
PROD: Franck Chorot, Cyril Colbeau-Justin, Jean-Baptiste Dupont
• DOP: Denis Rouden • ED: Hachdé • DES:
Ambre Fernandez • CAST: Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu,
Valeria Golino
Treading some superficially similar ground as
he did in Michael Haneke's Caché, Daniel Auteuil
returns as yet another emotionally racked Frenchman. Yet where
the earlier film was a dense, complex treatise on various
aspects of French society, 36 Quai des Orfèvres
is a straight-ahead crime thriller. Not that there's anything
wrong with that though.
The story begins with the theft of the eponymous
Quai des Orfèvres street sign (Quai des Orfèvres
being the Parisian equivalent of Scotland Yard), stolen at
the behest of Auteuil's character Detective Léo Vrinks
as a going away present for his partner Eddy Valence (Daniel
Duval, another Caché veteran). It is sometime
before we are able to differentiate between the good guys
and the bad guys. Given what follows, this is quite apt.
The crux of the plot emerges from the tension between power-hungry
Denis Klein (Gérard Depardieu) and the slightly less
amoral Vrinks. With a Serbian gang pulling off daring robberies
unchecked, it falls to the two opposing detectives to try
to solve the case – with promotion to Chief of Police
offered as a sweetener to whoever succeeds.
With some nifty grey/blue cinematography, the
plot unfolds against a backdrop of Paris's grittier neighbourhoods
and the hard-bitten relationship between Auteuil and a hard-drinking
Depardieu. All of which bears more than a passing resemblance
to some familiar Jean Pierre Melville films. It's a welcome
relief from some of the more audience-friendly French films
such as Amelie or Love me if you dare. Again, not that there's
anything wrong with that.
Where is this movie does fall down is
pacing. Up to a certain point the script is perfectly structured
and timed. The tightrope-like tension between Auteuil and
Depardieu culminates in some neat twists and double crosses
in the script but at that point where the story feels like
it's over, it carries on for another half hour.
It skips forward seven years for a where are they now-type
moment. We know it's many years later, if only because Depardieu
now sports an over-sized moustache. This epilogue all seems
rather superfluous and as ill advised as Gérard's upper-lip
hair, somewhat spoiling an otherwise fine film.
Aidan Beatty
Rated
TBC (see IFCO
website for details)
36 is released on 2nd June 2006
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