En territoire indien (2003)

En territoire indien is a French thriller film first released in 2003, directed by Lionel Epp.  The film stars François Berléand, Jérémie Renier, Claire Keim, Isabelle Roelandt and Hubert Saint-Macary.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Jean-Claude Adam is so close to realising his dream of starting a new life in Mexico, far from the troubles that weigh him down in France.  He has the money.  He has the air ticket.  Everything is prepared.  Then, one night, he knocks down a young couple whilst driving home.  He manages to hide the bodies, but doesn’t know that the accident was witnessed – by a strange, solitary young man, Cédric.  The latter discovers that one of the “victims”, a young woman named Gladys, is merely injured.  Having recovered, Gladys persuades Cédric to concoct a scheme to extort money out of Jean-Claude.  As the police and his gangster partners close in on him, the last thing Jean-Claude needs is to be blackmailed…

En territoire indien is Lionel Epp’s first full-length film (although he previously directed a film for television), a dark thriller which brings an original approach to a very familiar genre.   The familiar gangster film motifs are immediately apparent, but these are combined with a visual style that evokes the old-style Hollywood western.  Wide open spaces add to the sense of a brutal Existentialist nightmare from which the main character (magnificently portrayed by François Berléand) cannot escape.  The western theme is underscored by the repeated references to Red Indian culture, in particular through the character Cédric (Jérémie Renier, another first rate performance), a strange young man who has formed an intense spiritual bond with the world around him.

The film certainly shows a lot of potential in its first half, but much of this fails to be realised in what follows.  The drama ends more or less as in a conventional thriller (i.e. with plenty of nail-biting tension and gore), without a satisfactory resolution for the characters Cédric and Gladys.  The eerily sombre mood of the film is marred by some misplaced comedy (the inept gendarmes seem totally out of place here), and the jumpy editing merely renders a fairly complicated plot even more confusing.   However, these grumbles aside, En territoire indien is a strangely compelling film which has some great artistic strengths, revealing a director with considerable talent and a flair for innovation.

© James Travers 2007

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