Police

Just when you thought Gérard Depardieu couldn't get any sexier, he made Police. Ladies, if you want to see him as a tough-talking cop, you've got to rent this movie.

This isn't your typical cop flick. It's not loaded with action scenes, it's not particularly gritty, and it's not a comedy about two unlikely partners finding a lasting friendship as they bicker and solve an impossible case. This is just a day-in-the-life movie about cops trying to bust drug-dealers. They have to slog through uncooperative witnesses, red tape, clues that don't lead anywhere, and a moral line that they can't cross but sometimes do. Sophie Marceau is the leading lady, a bad girl who only thinks of herself. She's cute as a button, though, so even though he knows she's bad news, Gérard can't ignore the attraction he feels for her. Check this one out if you're in the mood for a French flick from the '80s with two cutie-pies as the leads.

This is the one attempt that Pialat made to do a police procedural film. The story is told of how he got Depardieu and Marceau, the two biggest stars at the time, to commit to the project, then realized he had no script. He dispatched Catherine Breillat, she of the steamy soft-core classics, to spend her nights in Belleville soaking up the atmosphere of Arab drug gangs and write a script. Of course, he hated it... But why go on. Pialat's films are such a triumph of will over circumstances (his own failings) that it is useless to analyze the making of them.

He has got Depardieu to play a detective, but somehow the character flows naturally out of Loulou, made five years previously. There is the same wildness, the same physicality, the same need to take risks. When the detectives, the hooker, the lawyer and Noria are all in the nightclub together, they are all risking something but they don't care much. The plot turns on a cache of drug money found in Noria's apartment, but that is just a convenience for the viewer; Pialat has a need to show us people under pressure, getting beaten, getting shot, spending time in prison and so forth.

Reality intrudes on fiction: Frank Karaoui--who has several scenes as a restaurant owner and drug dealer--was convicted of dealing in real life.

You know "Police" isn't going to be a conventional policier simply because it's directed by Maurice Pialat and Pialat doesn't do conventional. Yes, there's a 'thriller' plot involving drug dealers but the plot is secondary to the way both the police and the criminals are seen to go about their business which in many ways is much the same, (a crooked lawyer, nicely played by Richard Anconina, moves between them with seemingly consummate ease).

The central character is Gerard Depardieu's charming, brutalizing inspector who thinks nothing of beating up suspects to get a confession and both he and the film may remind you of Kirk Douglas in "Detective Story" and it's a beautiful piece of acting. Equally good, as the drug dealer's girl that Depardieu falls for, is Sophie Marceau. Ultimately the 'thriller' plot is all but jettisoned as Pialat digs deeper into the lives and backgrounds of his characters which is just as well as the plot becomes both very complicated and a little ridiculous. Still, this is a Pialat picture; mean, melancholy and fiercely intelligent.

I don't think anybody can make films like the French. Let's all go to France and watch films. Maurice Pialat has put something together here that's like a religious experience. At the end a soaring modern aria comes on and right there in the first few notes you realize he really did trick us - it wasn't about money, lust and war but life and the common tragedy. This is a film I first saw on video about 7 years ago. It blew my mind then. Warhol had come to mind, because of the overall affectless tone, the plodding rhythm. I had found it in our local supermarket then and again last week, up for sale $3.50. No way I was going to miss it - I had blabbed about it to too many people thru the years. But I procrastinated looking at it, expecting it to be boring. I couldn't really remember much besides its tone. The schedule cleared, though, and equipped with a serious remote I chopped my way through slowly, back over the subtitles again and again catching it all. A knockout.

French director Maurice Pialat mixes his usual approach of dialogue- heavy improvisation and his own slightly twisted sense of 'realism' with the police procedural genre. Anchoring Police is the formidable Gerard Depardieu playing Inspector Mangin, a chunky pitbull of a man who mixes charm, playfulness and violence together as he plays his way through the crime-fighting game with equal amounts of efficiency and carelessness. Pialat's camera, loose and restless, seems fascinated by him, and Depardieu's performance devours the film, overshadowing the director's themes of loneliness and criminality in France.

The first two-thirds of Police are it's best, as Mangin is caught up investigating a bunch of Tunisian drug-dealing criminals, and has his eye caught by the doe-eyed and beautiful Noria (Sophie Marceau), the girlfriend of one of the chief suspects. It's in these early scenes that Mangin is off the leash, slamming suspects heads into tables as a manner of interrogation, and, outside of work, joking with his friend Lambert (Richard Anconina), the criminal lawyer for most of the scumbags that Mangin puts away. Lambert is good at what he does, and most of his clients get off, yet he and Mangin laugh and joke about the system. It's all just a game to Mangin, something for him to do in order to satisfy his many appetites, as the line between the police and criminals is blurred.

Then Police settles down somewhat, as Noria turns from frightened innocent to fully-fledged femme fatale. She gets herself involved in a stolen wad of cash, and suddenly no-one is safe. Mangin is slowly revealed to be a lonely widower, and the film loses it's momentum. The fast dialogue and the murky world of pushers, pimps and prostitutes fades in favour of long takes in empty rooms, and Mangin suddenly isn't as interesting as he was. Sometimes it's better to prolong the mystery, to keep a character's motivations skewed. But Police is still a great ride, featuring one of Depardieu's best ever performances.

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