Un crime (1993) - film review

Fifteen months after being arrested for the murder of his wealthy parents, Frédéric Chapelin-Tourvel is acquitted on evidence provided by his girlfriend, Franca Miller.  Charles Dunant, the lawyer who defended Frédéric at his trial, is surprised when he receives a phone call from his former client, inviting him to his parents’ apartment.  Dunant is incredulous when Frédéric admits that he did indeed kill his parents and explains just how it took place...

One of the most unjustly underrated of Alain Delon’s later films is this twisted and highly compelling psychological drama in which the iconic actor is given the rare luxury of playing a real character (a lawyer facing up to his fallibility) instead of a mere caricature that feeds off his star image.   Here, Delon appears alongside an extremely talented newcomer, Manuel Blanc, in what is pretty well a two-handed play, and therein lies most of its appeal.  At a time when the policier genre had become predominantly action-oriented and sensationalist, Un crime bucked the trend and is an unashamedly character-centric piece, focused on the cat-and-mouse game that the two protagonists play as they unravel the truth of a monstrous criminal exploit.  The film is based on the novel Le Dérapage by the distinguished French writer Gilles Perrault, who was reputedly unimpressed by the film and refused to have anything to do with it.

Un crime is the eighth of nine films which Alain Delon made with director Jacques Deray, who is considered one of the masters of the French policier of the 1970s and ’80s.  Deray’s restrained mise-en-scène, which relies on subtle camera motion and atmospheric lighting to build and sustain tension, as in the old films noirs, is perfectly suited to this kind of old-fashioned drama, and allows the principal actors to have far more control over the film than is customary nowadays.  Un crime feels far more like a piece of theatre than a film, its pace and energy deriving not from fancy direction or editing, but from the mesmerising interplay of the two main characters as they dig deeper into each other’s personal graveyards to learn the truth about one another.  Despite the difference in age and experience, Delon and Blanc complement one another perfectly and almost appear to be mirror images of one another - in each case, a superficially attractive exterior masks an interior that is dark, mysterious and riddled with complex neuroses.

By the early 1990s, Alain Delon’s popularity had slumped to an unprecedented low after a series of major flops in the 1980s.  Un crime was similarly ill-received, both by the critics and the cinema-going public, although it did not dissuade Delon and Deray from working together one more time, on L’Ours en peluche (1994), Deray’s last film.  A slow-paced, character-oriented film noir, Un crime would probably fare much better with today’s cinema audiences than it did in the 1990s, when such films were considered démodé and uninteresting.  Delon’s sober and humane portrayal of a disenchanted lawyer prefigures his subsequent acclaimed character creations for the small screen, Fabio Montale and Frank Riva, and leaves us in no doubt that inside every iconic film star there is a great actor struggling to get out.

© James Travers 2011

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