Coup d’éclat (2011) - film review

In the French town of Sète, police chief Fabienne Bourrier spends much of her time pursuing illegal immigrants from all backgrounds.  Her professional routine is disrupted by the death of a young prostitute named Olga, an obvious suicide case.  Fabienne becomes interested when she learns that Olga had a son and was being hunted by someone.  Driven by a compassion that even takes her by surprise, Fabienne sets out to look for the missing child...

Director José Alcala garnered widespread critical acclaim with his first film Alex (2005), an austere realist portrait of a young woman trying to come to grips with something of an existential crisis.  Alcala’s second film covers similar territory but adopts a far bleaker tone as it follows a disillusioned woman police officer on a personal odyssey that will inevitably end in either redemption or destruction.  An uncomfortable melange of social realist drama and modern film noir thriller, Coup d’éclat serves as both a compelling study in obsession and a pretty damning indictment of contemporary France, particularly in relation to how immigrants are neglected by the state and exploited by criminals.

The film is set in the southern French port of Sète, a town with a high immigrant population which previously served as the location of Abdel Kechiche’s acclaimed La Graine et le mulet (2007).  In stark contrast to Kechiche’s sunny portrayal, the Mediterranean town looks like something that has barely survived the Apocalypse when viewed through José Alcala’s cynical, noir-tinted lens.   The forlorn shipyard, derelict factories and rundown neighbourhoods all suggest a society that is sinking irreversibly into physical and moral decay.  It is a landscape of despair that not only provides a fitting hyper-realist backdrop for the drama but also pricks our collective conscience, reminding us that on the margins of our supposedly affluent, well-ordered society there are extremes of poverty and neglect that we can scarcely imagine.

Catherine Frot is surprisingly well-cast in the lead role, that of the world-weary cop Fabienne who decides to go off on a personal crusade (risking both her job prospects and her life in the process) when she wakes up to the fact that hunting illegal immigrants is not the most rewarding of careers.  Frot is still better known for her comedy portrayals but her arresting and nuanced performance in this film may well alter this perception forever.  The abject bleakness that we see around Fabienne, evoked by the grim urban settings and the almost total lack of compassion and empathy that people show towards one another, seems to reflect the inner wilderness that Frot projects.  There are allusions to past catastrophes in Fabienne’s life, but we are never quite sure what brought her to the state she is now in, locked in a solitary self-destructive Hell, her only solace being one glass of wine too many at the end of an unbearably trying day.  Frot’s portrayal of Fabienne is as cold and prickly as the world she inhabits, but there is also a shard of humanity that compels us to engage with her, in spite of her abruptness and tendency to melancholic introspection.

Coup d’éclat probably works better as a social realist drama than a traditional policier.  Despite Catherine Frot’s gripping performance and Alcala’s assured mise-en-scène, the film does struggle a little to keep its thriller elements from collapsing under the weight of their own artifice.  Some weaknesses in the script cause the film to slip into cliché and caricature periodically, and the unsubtle plot contrivances are hard to overlook.  These failings are however largely countered by the film’s artistic strengths, in particular its biting realism (which is evidently Alcala’s forte) and a carefully sustained mood of oppression (which lies somewhere between Kafka and Simenon), to say nothing of Frot’s remarkable contribution.   Coup d’éclat is a dark and brooding piece, in which a severe case of mid-life crisis is brought into brutal collision with the grim realities of immigration and urban deprivation.  Not a comfortable ride, but a worthwhile one.

© James Travers 2011

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