À bout portant (2010) - film review

Everything was going so well for Samuel.  He was about to qualify as a nurse and his wife Nadia was expecting their first child.  But then it all went wrong, just because Samuel happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  When Nadia is kidnapped under his impotent gaze, Samuel knows that his life will never be the same again.  Having regained consciousness, he receives a sinister ultimatum from the people who have abducted his wife.  If he wants to see Nadia again in one piece, he must deliver to her kidnappers one of his patients, a shady looking man named Hugo Sartet.   Realising what they are up against, Samuel and Sartet agree to pool their resources.  Alas, time is not on their side...

From the director of the widely acclaimed Pour Elle (2008),  recently remade in America as The Next Three Days by Paul Haggis, comes another adrenalin-pumping action thriller, one of the best to come out of France in years.  It is a fast-moving, full-bodied modern French polar that grabs your attention almost from the first frame, drags you at breakneck speed through a bleak post-noir landscape and doesn’t let go until the end credits crash in and send you back to reality with a jolt.  Director Fred Cavayé brings not only a frenetic energy and visceral realism to À bout portant but also a stark humanity - his characters are not the predictable thriller stereotypes, but well-drawn, complex human beings coping with the crises that come their way.   Although the plot is even more credibility-stretching than Cavayé’s previous film, somehow this one feels more real, partly because it is better structured and far less prone to pointless navel-gazing introspection, but mainly because the main protagonists are more convincingly developed and played with much greater conviction.

The easiest criticism to make of À bout portant is that its plot is virtually identical to that of Pour elle.  Both films are centred on an ordinary man who allows himself to be propelled into an extraordinary adventure in order to save the person dearest to him.  Fred Cavayé is clearly an old-fashioned romantic at heart, but there is something irresistible about the notion that love (rather than gamma radiation or a teaspoon of Kryptonite) can transform a mild-mannered nobody into an athletic action hero.  On this occasion, Monsieur Tout-le-monde is a humdrum nurse played by the charismatic Gilles Lellouche, in his most arresting and substantial performance to date.   Interestingly, this part was originally intended for Lellouche’s better-known co-star Roschdy Zem.  Once he had seen the script, Zem was adamant that he would play the rougher character, Hugo Sartet (cheekily named after a gangster played by Alain Delon in Le Clan des Siciliens (1969)), and he does so with a surprising brutality and vigour.

Much of the film revolves around the uncomfortable relationship between Lellouche and Zem’s diametrically opposed characters, the sympathetic good guy and the hardened criminal.  It is a classic set-up - two ill-matched individuals forced into an alliance through mutual self-interest, with both undergoing a profound transformation under the other’s influence.  More than anything, this is what makes the film so compelling and Lellouche and Zem’s true-to-life performances elevate it way above the level of a standard action thriller.  To his credit, screenwriter Guillaume Lemans does not weigh the film down with needless exposition but instead leaves much unsaid.  Not only does this help the film maintain its unremitting pace, but it heightens the suspense and gives it a chilling Kafka-esque mystique.  Like the characters we see on the screen, we cannot help feeling we have been caught up in a complex game of intrigue, whose rules have yet to be elucidated and whose outcome is far from certain.

Galvanised by its magnetic central performances, À bout portant particularly excels in its mise-en-scène and editing, arguably the two areas that can so easily make or break a thriller.  The action scenes are exceptionally well-shot and well-cut, especially the frantic chase through the Paris Métro, which stands up well alongside similar sequences in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981).  As the film builds to its nerve-wracking climax, the tension becomes almost unbearable, and whilst the resolution is perhaps a little too hurried and a tad complacent, it provides a reasonably satisfying conclusion to a relentless and pretty gruelling barrage of thrills and spills.   À bout portant does perhaps adhere a little too slavishly to a familiar formula, but this is more than made up for by the sheer quality of the direction, editing and acting.  How many months will it be before its American remake gets the green light?  It’s reassuring to know that Hollywood can still learn a thing or two from the French...

© James Travers 2011

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?