Diamant 13 (2009)
Directed by Gilles Béhat

Film Review

Twenty years on, director Gilles Béhat returns to cinema with this über-bleak film noir drama, but shows little of the flair and vigour that illuminated his early films in the genre, Rue barbare (1984) and Urgence (1985).  In the intervening two decades, Béhat has been busy pursuing a successful career in French television, concentrating mainly on crime dramas.  Based on a novel written in the 1980s, Diamant 13 feels like it was unearthed from the same decade, and looks like a clumsy attempt to graft the distinctive neo-noir style of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) onto a modern ultra-violent crime film, typified by Olivier Marchal's 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004), complete with stomach churning bodily eviscerations, exploding heads and the odd decapitation.  Lovely, just what you need after watching The Sound of Music (1965).

Olivier Marchal not only collaborated with Béhat on the script, he plays one of the lead characters in the film, but the film compares very poorly with his own directorial offerings.  Despite a commendable central performance from Gérard Depardieu (if only the script had been better he might have been nominated for a César) the film fails to sustain the viewer's interest, partly because the plot is so heavily entrenched in overly familiar clichés, but mainly because it is singularly lacking in human feeling.  The world that Béhat presents is a soulless crime-ridden hinterland that appears to be in permanent darkness, a pale imitation of the nightmare vista conjured up by Blade Runner, and the characters might just as well be robots - an uninteresting, unsympathetic ensemble of tedious pulp fiction caricatures.  With little on the character front to hold our attention, Béhat's stilted directorial approach soon becomes stale and wearisome, and by the mid-point you really have lost the will to live. Even Julie Andrews singing about dew drops and kittens is preferable to this.

Film Synopsis

Mat is a world-weary cop who has long had his illusions torn from him.  Now in his late fifties, one of the least enthusiastic members of the 13th night division, he carries out his professional duties with an almost robotic perfunctoriness.  A solitary and emotionless individual, he is troubled by his past - a past littered with blunders that have badly hampered his career - and has no hopes for the future.  The world he inhabits is dark and lonely, and Mat finds it increasingly difficult to know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.  The stench of corruption seems to cling to everyone he comes into contact with, including his own fellow cops.

Mat's life takes a dramatic turn when, one day, an old friend of his, Franck, gets in touch with him and makes him a strange proposal.  It seems that Franck, a cop assigned to a team that combats drugs trafficking, has uncovered a massive money laundry scheme in which several prominent individuals - including a number of high-ranking police officials - are implicated.  It seems that the task of exposing this fantastic operation is more than Franck can handle by himself, so he needs Mat's help in bringing this off.

Self-preservation concerns Mat more than becoming a hero, so realising that his friend is getting himself into deep water he refuses to give his support.  When he learns, a short while later, that Franck has been killed, Mat feels impelled to look into the affair.  If he needed an incentive to risk his own neck on an operation of this magnitude, the brutal death of his one and only friend provides just that.  It is with uncharacteristic assiduity that Mat throws himself into what might well be his very last investigation...