L’Avocat (2011) - film review

Léo Demarsan has barely qualified as a lawyer before he secures a prestigious client who is keen to exploit his flair for business law.  But Paul Vanoni is not the reputable businessman he appears to be.   He is in fact a ruthless gangster who intends to use Léo to deflect attention from his illicit activities and reinforce the image of respectability that keeps him out of jail.  One day, Léo is approached by someone who claims to be an undercover police operative.  The stranger persuades the young lawyer that unless he helps to bring Vanoni to justice he will ultimately go the same way as his predecessor.  His reward for helping a notorious hoodlum will be a brutal and agonising death.   But what can Léo expect if he chooses to betray his employer...?

After his well-received debut feature Le Tueur (2008) director Cédric Anger opted to stay in film noir territory for his next film, a similarly slick realist thriller, albeit one that owes as much to the novels of John Grisham as it does to classic American film noir.  The plot, a pretty blatant reworking of Grisham’s The Firm, is the film’s least important ingredient (which is just as well, otherwise Grisham might be minded to go after Anger with a plagiarism suit).  It is what Anger does with the well-worn scenario (and its even more well-worn archetypal characters) that makes the film worth watching, in spite of some obvious shortcomings.  As he did so brilliantly on Le Tueur, Anger plunges the spectator into a chilling noir-scape of fear and anxiety, in which the hero (this time a rookie lawyer with a moral deficit to match his naivety and self-adoration) learns that a healthy bank balance and designer wardrobe are no substitute for a quiet gangster-free life. 

The film’s pedestrian first half, with its abundance of tired clichés and trite dialogue, is just about forgiven when the story finally gets underway and suddenly starts ratcheting up the tension to its grim and all-too-predictable climax.  Given that before he turned to directing Cédric Anger was highly regarded as a screenwriter - notably for his work on Xavier Beauvois’s Selon Matthieu (2000) and Le Petit lieutenant (2005) - it is surprising that the one area where L’Avocat falls down is its screenplay, which is lacking both in structure and depth of characterisation.  Despite the high word count and overly protracted set up, the characters are much less convincing and evoke far less spectator involvement than those in Anger’s previous film Le Tueur, which employs dialogue with an Occam’s Razor economy.  The fact that Benoît Magimel is slightly miscast in the lead role (and looks frankly ridiculous when he does his Perry Mason bit) does not help matters.  You might almost think that Anger is doing everything within his power to prevent the audience from sympathising with his hero...

Those who have the stamina and patience to sit through the gruelling first half of L’Avocat (which feels like the cruellest parody of a John Grisham novel, if you dare imagine such a thing) are finally rewarded with a good forty minutes or so of solid, edge-of-the-seat thriller, in which Anger and his cast are at last able to play to their strengths.  Cast very much again type, Gilbert Melki is superb as the central villain, a delectably smooth hoodlum who exudes charm and menace as though he held the world monopoly on both (think Marlon Brando in The Godfather) - such a pity that his character doesn’t play a greater role in the drama.   Eric Caravaca is another inspired and, on the face of it, completely mad casting choice for the part of the shady police operative.  With a sinister aura of sublime creepiness that can only be described as Pinter-esque, Caravaca slips in and out of the narrative like a slippery Mephistopheles, luring the too easily corruptible Magimel into one more Faustian contract whilst casually sampling the delights of hotel hospitality.

In the face of this two-pronged onslaught from Melki and Caravaca is it any wonder that Magimel’s portrayal of the film’s bland lawyer-hero lacks colour and impact?   Fortunately, the creditable supporting contributions from Barbet Schroeder, Aïssa Maïga and Samir Guesmi help to limit the damage, but not enough to prevent the spectator from relishing Magimel’s slow and richly deserved descent into Hell.  It probably wasn’t envisaged as such but L’Avocat is the film equivalent of Room 101, mild therapy for anyone with a festering grudge against lawyers.  The film’s tongue-in-cheek ending offers a tantalising glimpse of what the film might have been had Cédric Anger been just a little bit more daring and less of a slave to the film noir aesthetic - the ultimate anti-lawyer black comedy.

© James Travers 2011

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?