Films worth talking about indeed
36 Quai des Orfevres
A french film that was featured at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2005
It was such a good show catch that GL and I watched it again last night. Really good storyline, good plot, fanastic cast... Go catch it... :-)
Below is a brief introduction taken from the edinburgh film fest website.
After three decades on the force, Superintendent Mancini (André Dussollier) is about to retire. Two high-ranking plainclothes detectives - Leo Vrinks (Daniel Auteuil) and Denis Klein (Gérard Depardieu) - are each tipped to take his place. The pair were once close friends, but their relationship has soured, as Klein has succumbed to drink, a certain moral expediency, and his own immoderate ambitions. Mancini sets them a task: to capture the gang responsible for a string of murderous heists on armoured cars around Paris. Whoever succeeds in nailing the perps, he declares, will inherit his job. But the ensuing contest soon escalates into a protracted and reckless power struggle, into which the subordinates and families of both men are drawn - often at great cost. Before long, it becomes apparent that only one man can survive.
Writer-director Olivier Marchal was himself a cop, back in the turbulent mid-1980s, and for all his concessions to mainstream cinema (that cool blue palette, the near-constant score), he also manages to bring a sense of weary verisimilitude to proceedings: one would have to look to Bertrand Tavernier's superb L.627, or Maurice Pialat's Police, to find so disenchanted a depiction of life behind the French shield. Here, a handful of decent, if not exactly idealistic cops do battle, not only with the criminals they've pledged to bring down, but also with the corruption, inefficiency and disregard that plague their own ranks. The narrative apparently draws on actual case histories, and the film divides its attention neatly between spectacular action sequences and bloodless detection, shootouts and conversations. Above all, it conveys an unusually acute sense of the danger of police work, where neither the benefits of experience or the reassurance of procedure can always protect against betrayal, stupidity or simple bad luck. In this film, violence is abrupt, extreme and almost always fatal.
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