Gangsters (2002)
Directed by Olivier Marchal

Film Review

Gangsters marked an auspicious directing debut for Olivier Marchal, who derived considerable capital from the fact that, in the 1980s, he had had first-hand experience of real police work in Paris.  The exhausting reality of being a real-life cop proved too much for Marchal and he embarked on a new career in the early 1990s as an actor, rapidly getting himself typecast as the archetypal seasoned cop in films such as Profil bas (1993) and prime time television series such as Quai numéro un and Police District.  Marchal's dream of directing his own film came to fruition in 2001, with a comparatively low budget realist policier that immediately marked him out for bigger and better things.

Gangsters was both written and directed by Olivier Marchal, and this accounts for the film's most striking feature - its unwavering authenticity.  The film is far from perfect - Marchal makes many of the errors you'd expect from a first-timer - but it also has a lot going for it, in spite of the over-abundance of clichés and a slightly off-putting level of self-consciousness in the mise-en-scène.  For the most part, Gangsters feels like a grim throwback to the 1980s, carrying obvious echoes of hard-boiled cop movies such as Ne réveillez pas un flic qui dort (1988), the film in which Marchal had made his cinema acting debut.

This retro-feel is emphasised by the presence of two divas of the 1980s, Richard Anconina and Anne Parillaud, two highly engaging actors who both appear most at home in the policier genre.  Anconina had lent his talents to a number of noteworthy French thrillers of the '80s - Le Choix des armes (1981), Le Battant (1983) and (most notably) Maurice Pialat's Police (1985).  Pariallaud was (and remains) closely associated with her lead role in Luc Besson's cult 1990 thriller, Nikita.  The pairing of Anconina and Pariallaud is daring but only partly successful, the conviction of the leads' performances somewhat undermined by a script that lacks punch in a few scenes.

Gangsters is a fairly conventional policier offering which Marchal goes out of his way to liven up with some bold, possibly excessive, stylistic touches.  The narrative is over-reliant on flashbacks, a gimmick that weakens the flow of the film and robs it of a satisfying coherence.  The jarring editing and some close-to-the-knuckle bursts of violence work well together to convey a sense of the  raw brutality and precariousness of the milieu into which we are thrust, one in which double dealing is rife and you can never be sure which side of the moral divide the cops are really on.  In blurring the boundary between the career criminals and their over-zealous police pursuers Gangsters replays a familiar trope of the classic French policier, one that was artfully employed by Jean-Pierre Melville in such films as Le Deuxième souffle (1966) and Un flic (1972).

Such was the commercial and critical success of his modest debut feature that Olivier Marchal was then able to progress to the kind of big budget thriller he had been hankering after for so long.  36 quai des Orfèvres (2004) brought together two icons of French cinema - Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil - and with a substantially greater budget Olivier had the opportunity to impress with his dazzling fresh vision for the modern policier movie.  This is the film that established the director's reputation as a serious filmmaker, both at home in France and internationally.

Film Synopsis

Franck Chaievski is a small-time crook who is used to being picked up by the police.  A habitual recidivist, he cannot escape from a life of crime, and when his latest hold-up goes badly wrong he finds himself back in police custody, along with his girlfriend Nina Delgado, a drug-addicted prostitute.  Franck and Nina are subjected to relentless questioning, so determined are their police interrogators to extract every last scrap of information from them about the daring criminal exploit that ended with so much bloodshed.  The police's main concern is to establish the whereabouts of the stolen booty - a stash of uncut diamonds valued at 80 million francs.  Naturally, Franck reckons he can stand up to the barrage of questions and naked hostility, but police officers Eddy Dahan and Marc Jansen think otherwise.  For these hardened cops, the battle of wills has only just begun, and they intend to win...