Boulevard des assassins (1982) - film review

Worn down by the failure of his latest novel and his divorce, a 50 year old writer Daniel Salmon accepts an offer from his publisher to take a working holiday in a town on the Côte d’Azur.  From the start, Salmon suspects something fishy is going on in the town.  Intrigued by the disappearance of the girlfriend of the man whose flat he is staying in, and by the mysterious death of an elderly woman who refused to sell her land to a development company, Daniel decides to investigate...

Viewed as a serious crime thriller, Boulevard des assassins is a film that fails at so many levels that it just does not really stand up to scrutiny.  It is certainly dated by the standards of the early 1980s, seeming to have arrived ten years late.  It really does have that jarring artificial feel of a mid 1970s French crime drama.

If the director Boramy Tioulong had intended this to be a serious thriller, he was either misguided or sublimely incompetent.  On the other hand, if the film is regarded as a subdued send-up of the kind of nonsense that gave French cinema a very bad name in the 1970s, then Boulevard des assassins does achieve something.  Viewed in the proper frame of mind, this can be seen as a very incisive parody of the worst in French detective cinema.

The reasons for not taking the film seriously are too numerous to mention.  The rambling plot which makes great pains to confuse the viewer before revealing a staggeringly unsurprising conclusion.  The catchy but increasingly nauseating background score which remains persistently lodged in your head for days after having watching the film, and which manages to evoke the very essence of 1970s French cinema, to almost nightmarish proportions.  The excessive use of voice-over narration to explain, reiterate, and generally muddle the plot – a device that should have been buried in the 1960s.  Add to that a list of characters all of whom are blatant stereotypes, and most of whom are portrayed with mild disinterest by the cast, and you begin to wonder what Tioulong was attempting to achieve.

In spite of all this, many viewers will take pleasure in watching this film, particularly those with some familiarity with French cinema of the 1970s.  It is not a bad film as such, but it is easy to condemn it as a lacklustre TV movie (not surprising, since it is the only full-length cinema film made by Tioulong who was primary a TV film director).  Notable actors Trintingnant and Pisier give good entertainment value and the cinematography makes fair use of the South of France location.

© James Travers 2000

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