Un printemps à Paris (2006) - film review

Georges leaves prison, after a five-year long stretch, with the intention of making a fresh start.  No such hope.  His former partner in crime, Pierrot, appears on his doorstep and persuades him to take part in another criminal exploit – to steal a vast jewel collection from a wealthy Parisian woman.   The robbery goes like clockwork, but neither man is prepared for what follows.   Pierrot falls in love with the woman they robbed and their scheme to get their hands on the money for the stolen jewels quickly goes awry...

The last five years or so have seen an unexpected resurgence in the popularity of the policier, the French thriller genre which was enormously successful from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s.  Un printemps à Paris offers yet another re-interpretation of the genre, from director Jacques Bral (his fifth film in over thirty years).  The film stars Eddy Mitchell, a hugely popular French rock ’n’ roll singer who has made a respectable name for himself as a film actor since the early 1980s.

Thematically, the film is easily recognisable as an old-fashioned kind of thriller.  Bral has no qualms about paying obvious homage to his predecessors, such masters of the genre as Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Deray.  The modernity he brings is pretty much restricted to the cinematography and editing (which consists mainly, and irritatingly, of excessive camera movement and jarringly fast film cuts), with a few dollops of gratuitous eroticism thrown in for no apparent reason.

The film has a certain appeal (thanks to its high nostalgia factor) but it ultimately feels bland and insubstantial, and at times its pace is slow to the point of snail-crawling lethargy.  Bral’s focus on style is at the expense of content – the narrative lacks coherence, the characters are implausible and shallow (even if the performances are generally pretty good).  However, the main reason why Un printemps à Paris disappoints is that it looks too much like a lazy pastiche of a late-1970s thriller, dressed up shamelessly for a modern cinema audience.

© James Travers 2008

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