Les Marchands de sable (2000) - film review

After a spell in prison, Marie is reunited with her brother Antoine, who now works as a waiter in a terrace café in Paris.  What she doesn’t know is that Antoine is mixed up with a gang of ruthless drugs dealers.  After making a delivery to a client, Antoine is killed by his drug dealing associates when he tries to trick them.  Marie, refusing to accept Antoine’s death as an accident, resolves to uncover his murderers.  She enlists the help of her brother’s former employer, Alain, who is unwittingly being manipulated by the drug dealers.

Having established himself as a film director in the 1990s, through his entertaining and original comedy dramas, such as Les Apprentis (1995), Pierre Salvadori moves into very different territory for his fourth full-length film, Les Marchands de sable.   This is a violent, hard-edged crime thriller, very typical of the latest attempt in French cinema to reinvent the film noir thriller genre.  It makes a stark contrast with Salvadori’s earlier films, and the graphic depiction of violence and of a society apparently bereft of any morality is all the more shocking.

The film is an impressive (but not entirely faultless) first attempt by Salvadori to tackle a genre film.  Whilst the elements of traditional film noir are there for all to see, Salvadori manages to leave his own imprint and the result is overall a rather stylish, but perhaps deeply worrying, thriller, in the classic French mould.

© James Travers 2002

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