Fred (1997) - film review

Fred is an unemployed crane operator who lives in the industrial suburbs with his girlfriend Lisa.  The latter has a young son, the product of another relationship, and works in research laboratory.  The burden of unemployment weighs heavily on Fred and so when his friend Michel asks him to do him a favour, he jumps at the chance.  It is only later that he begins to smell a rat.  Why couldn’t Michel drive that lorry to the depot instead of him?  Was he mixed up in something illegal?   Another acquaintance, Yvan, persuades Fred to go with him to the site of a rundown factory.  Here, the two men are attacked by two strangers.  Yvan falls to his death and Fred realises that he will be an obvious scapegoat for his murder.  Sure enough, it isn’t long before the police come knocking on Lisa’s door.  Determined not to be imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Fred sets out to prove his innocence...

Several filmmakers have attempted to combine social realist drama and the traditional film noir thriller but few have been as successful as French director Pierre Jolivet, who has practically created a new genre in French cinema, the policier social.  Fred is probably the best example of this – a tough, suspenseful thriller with all the obvious film noir trappings, but relocated to the grim urban landscape of the French industrial suburbs.  Other good examples of Jolivet’s work include:  En plein coeur (1998) and Ma petite entreprise (1999).

Pierre Jolivet’s films are distinguished by their hard-edged realism and well-drawn characters with whom an audience can easily identify.  In Fred, Vincent Lindon gives a sympathetic performance as the classic noir hero, a man who becomes an outsider merely because he is unable to find work.  Even the cops, represented by François Berléand, appear to be at a loss, relying on heavy drinking to make their lacklustre lives bearable.   Jolivet paints a gloomy world in which potentially good people are mired in despair and ennui, becoming victims of the thugs and hoodlums who prey upon a disillusioned post-industrial society like vultures feasting on a decaying corpse.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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