Frantic (1988) - film review

Dr Richard Walker and his wife Sondra, an American couple, arrive in Paris ahead of a medical conference at which Dr Walker is to give a paper.  Not long after checking into their hotel, Sondra realises that she has the wrong suitcase and then mysteriously disappears.  Her husband is convinced that she has been abducted but the hotel staff and the local police seem unconcerned and give him little support in finding her.  Walker finally manages to track down the woman who took his wife’s suitcase, a professional smuggler named Michelle, but she can offer no clue to Sondra’s whereabouts.  The key to the mystery is something that Michelle was attempting to smuggle into France in her suitcase...

All too easily overlooked, Frantic is a compelling, well-crafted thriller which stands up well alongside director Roman Polanski’s other cinematic achievements.   Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of the slick noir thrillers that were prevalent in France in the 1980s.  Comparisons with Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) and Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) are easily made.  The setting is the same: an austere dreamlike Paris, where the authorities and the criminals occupy the same moral territory and where danger lurks on every boulevard.  The central character is a classic film noir hero, an outsider who finds himself thrown into life-and-death game about which he knows none of the rules and whose opponents are unknown and pretty well invisible.  

Despite being a quintessentially French thriller, Frantic has some obvious Hitchcockian touches and it is not too hard to see the references to Vertigo and North By Northwest.  As an amalgam of James Stewart and Cary Grant in these Hitchcock classics, Harrison Ford gives what is arguably the best performance of his career, playing a man who is desperately facing up to the twin demons of French bureaucracy and international gangsterism.  There is an intensity, humanity and honest-to-goodness realism to Ford’s performance here that makes many of his better known roles pale into insignificance.  Impressive in her first major role, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner proves to be an effective sensual Gallic counterpoint to Ford’s introspective machismo – she is the first truly modern femme fatale.  One of the most gripping and entertaining of Roman Polanski’s pure genre films, Frantic is a subtly tongue-in-cheek homage to the French film policier.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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