Cinema
Police (`15', selected cinemas)
On the French beat
Peter Ackroyd
Any film even remotely connected with the police seems always to be con- ducted in a low-rent style: unflattering lighting, discontinuous editing and a mini- mum of actual direction are only the three most obvious elements in a genre which has become as recognisable as a Popeye cartoon. They certainly mark the aptly but perhaps unimaginatively titled Police, a French film set in contemporary Paris.
Of course it 'stars' Gerard Depardieu. He has to appear in every French film this is written into his contract with God, which has allowed him to stay so relatively young for so long. Under normal circum- stances his role is that of the playfully bovine type, lovable if rather silly, but on this occasion his performance as a Parisian detective may come as a severe disappoint- ment to his many devoted fans. Here he is meant to be bad-tempered and often vio- lent — a big boy on a short fuse, in other words, and about as lovable as a string of old onions.
He is involved in a drugs case of more than usual squalor — we learn this almost at once, since the film opens uncere- moniously with a long dialogue on the subject between the detective and a small- time crook. More action follows, of course, and there is enough violence to have convinced some critics that Police is really a French attempt to outgun the Americans in their own territory. Certainly there is no trace of Gallic wit. There is not even a hint of film noir. But can we at least call it cinema verite? Cinema, perhaps, but not verite since the details of police procedure seem to have emanated from a script- writer's imagination rather than from some more sober source.
But it is still recognisably French: unlike most English or American police thrillers, for example, there is still a certain reliance on the powers of human speech. Police is suffused with a sort of demotic rhetoric; it may not be Racine, but it is certainly not Juliet Bravo. And, in particular, the film manages to avoid the American concern with sentimental and circumambient 'hu- man interest', so noticeable in series such as Hill Street Blues or Cagney and Lacey. In a country where waiters and concierges behave in an appropriate manner without even having been trained to do so, cops will be cops and robbers will be robbers. That is all. No sociological or psychological extenuations here. All this is very French.
The ruthless clarity of the analysis may pose a few problems for the Arab popula- tion of France, however, especially since the recent successes of the far right in the elections. In this film the immigrants are the villains — the pushers and the dealers come from the same ghastly family, and are generally portrayed as stupid thugs. As Gerard Depardieu says at one point, 'I don't Mind if they kill each other,' or words to that effect. The odd thing about Police, in fact, is the way that it endorses (and comes close to celebrating) the harsher and more corrupt forms of urban policing. That is in fact the essential purpose of the film — to reproduce a certain kind of brutality, thus assuaging the fantasies of the audi- ence, while at the same time preserving the mechanics of a police enquiry in order to lend spurious justification to that violence.
Perhaps this is the explanation for some long scenes between Depardieu and the chief female suspect (played by Sophie Marceau), where the sexual chemistry is on occasions interrupted by the laws of phy- sics at their most basic. Hand slaps face; face moves violently to the left; and so forth. Depardieu and Marceau look as if they were working together largely on instinct, however, and there is a general sense in which the film seems to have been made rather quickly.
Although Depardieu tries to carry the burden of the narrative on his increasingly large shoulders, the accumulation of inci- dents becomes a little wearying after a while. The motif seems to be that 'Deep down, everything is rotten.' If it is that deep down, it doesn't really matter, any way; and this simple insight is hardly enough to keep the film in motion. Only for Francophiles.
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