Have started reading Richard Brody’s biography of Godard. Wherein he notes early on the post-war agreement, at the time seen as an assault on French cinema, that “each French movie house show four weeks of French films per quarter”. This was seen then as a way of opening the door for the US to take over the cinemas in “nine out of every thirteen weeks”. However, in the long term, as Hollywood and free market capitalism and soft cultural power developed their takeover, this accord would protect the French film industry, guaranteeing the presence of French films in every cinema. In large part it might be down to this that the French cinema industry remains so robust, churning out movies with homegrown stars and a guaranteed local audience. This might also explain why so much French cinema, (which for reasons that demand another line of investigation ends up being screened in Montevideo), is highly generic. Zonca’s Fleuve Noir is a prime example. The narrative is in so many ways a routine cop story. Dishevelled and destroyed flic, Vincent Cassel, one part Bad Lieutenant, another part Morse, struggles with his demons as he seeks to discover who is responsible for the disappearance, presumed death, of teenage Danny, a kid the same age as Cassel’s own wayward son. The slightly pedestrian narrative is bolstered by the presence of Romain Duris as would-be novelist who gets so excited by Danny’s disappearance, (he is a neighbour who at one point tutored Danny), that he starts to meddle in the case, arousing Cassel’s distaste and suspicion. The narrative always feels a bit clunky; the strand with Cassel’s son never really goes anywhere, the ending feels slightly overdone. It feels likely that if this got anywhere near to being made in the UK it would be as a TV drama, perhaps split into three episodes, and given the relative mundanity of the material, perhaps it might have functioned more effectively in that format. However, there is one thing that would have been lost, which is probably the thing that makes the film worth making in the first place. Which is the opportunity for some grandstanding acting from Cassel and Duris. Cassel rocks a truly manky beard, he goes full-on ugly, even developing a weirdly loping walk. It’s an old-school performance, which could have come out of a fifties black and white policier. Duris seems to be enjoying himself immensely as the marginally deranged would-be novelist who quotes Kafka and Camus. He too has a particular walk, a jaunty straight-backed mechanism which perfectly suits the character. Fleuve Noir reminds us of how we go to the cinema to watch actors perform, how the material is so often a mere canvas upon which they paint their art, with its nuances and exaggerations. It’s not a great movie, but it has a despotic charm, the pleasure of watching artists at work.
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