L'Attentat (1972)
Directed by Yves Boisset

Film Review

One of the most notorious political controversies to hit France in the 1960s was the alleged complicity of the French state in the kidnapping and execution of the Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka on 29th October 1965.  The so-called Ben Barka Affair still remains shrouded in mystery but there was sufficient ground to at least entertain the idea that the French security services had a hand in this murky business.  It would have taken a braver cineaste than Yves Boisset to make a film that directly referenced this affair, and this is why he instead made one which was a thinly veiled allusion.  L'Attentat was the director's first significant film and established him as one of the masters of the nascent neo-polar or neo-thriller genre, in which he particularly excelled.

Given the highly controversial nature of the film's subject matter, it is no surprise that Boisset had difficulties getting it off the ground. Despite the many set-backs and threats that came his way, the director was able to complete the film and it proved to be a substantial critical and commercial success.  Boisset had already helped to revive the flagging policier genre in the early 1970s with his early screen offerings, Cran d'arrêt (1970) and Un condé (1970), which distinguished themeselves with their gritty realism and full-throttle action sequences.  Boisset brings the same authenticity and visual flair to L'Attentat, but with more emphasis on character development and a greater confidence with sustaining a complex inter-weaving narrative, in which things are not always quite what they seem.

In L'Attentat, we have a foretaste of the director's subsequent masterpiece, Le Juge Fayard dit Le Shérif (1977), one of the finest examples of the French neo-polar.  Ricardo Aronovich's moody photography is subtly yet powerfully enhanced by Ennio Morricone's spine-tingling music, both bringing an unremitting aura of noir menace to the film.  But what makes it so memorable and so compelling is another stand-out performance from its leader actor, the impeccably cast Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Trintignant wasn't just a great actor with a remarkable range.  On screen, he came equipped with a natural vulnerability and cool detachment that made him especially well suited to play the central protagonist in thrillers of this ilk - characters that are an obvious 1970s avatar of the film noir heroes of the '40s and '50s.  Trintignant's innate ability to engage with an audience's sympathies is exploited by Boisset to the full, and what a contrast he makes with the rogues gallery he is up against - Michel Bouquet, Bruno Cremer, François Périer and Jean Bouise, a coterie that chillingly evokes a rotten French super-elite that exists merely to service its own nefarious interests.  Gian Maria Volonté was famous for playing neurotics characters and so is well-chosen for the role of the menaced assassination target, and Michel Piccoli brings an unfettered relish to his interpretation of the main villain of the piece.

It would be more than three decades before French cinema would revisit the Ben Barka affair with such bravado.  Regrettably, Serge Le Péron and Saïd Smihi's J'ai vu tuer Ben Barka (2005) fails to do justice to its subject and looks pretty feeble compared with Yves Boisset's gripping tour de force.  L'Attentat is one of the landmark French policiers of the 1970s, and it doubtless played a part in making the genre the most popular and commercially successful of the decade. Having apparently found his niche, you would have expected Boisset to stick with the thriller genre and stay clear of controversy. Perversely, this is exactly what he didn't do and his next film, R.A.S., saw him tackle an even more contentious subject - France's war with Algeria. It was to be the most daring, certainly the most fraught film of his entire career.

Film Synopsis

In the immediate aftermath of a coup d'état in an unnamed North African state, a progressive member of the opposition, Sadiel, fears for his life and is forced to flee to Switzerland.  Knowing that  Sadiel still poses a threat to his brutally authoritarian regime, Colonel Kassar gets in touch with the French security services and persuades them to go after a man who, he insists, is a dangerous political activist.  François Darien, a police informer, is recruited to lure Sadiel to Paris, ostensibly to take part in a television programme on the Third World.  The unsuspecting Sadiel has barely set foot in Paris when he is abducted and handed over to his political opponents, who show him no mercy.  Darien now realises that he has been duped and, disgusted by the way in which he has been manipulated into betraying a decent human being, he resolves to put things to rights.  Unfortunately, he doesn't quite realise the enormity of the task that faces him...