French Connection is a film that can’t stay still. Everyone is constantly on the move. In cars, in trains, in a boat, but more often than not, on foot. Freidkin has a similar restless energy to early Godard. It feels as though he wants to devour every corner of the city and in many ways the film ends up being, as much as anything else, a portrait of New York. This is cinema as flaneur. The film moves from high end hotel district to Harlem to the riverside, and it crossed my mind whilst watching it to wonder how those cities I know well, London and Montevideo, might have looked had the film been set there. This capturing of the city helps to reaffirm the director’s desire to shoot the film with the realistic feel of a documentary, (there’s also a hint of Cassettes’ roaming NY camera), transporting the slightly generic thriller material into something harder-edged, straight off the streets. At times this makes for a film that has the feel of a whisky hangover: life is washed out, desperately needing sleep or the blackest of black coffee, struggling to stay alert, numbed by the inevitability of the next chase, the next frenetic declaration which will reassure the detectives, Gene Hackman, even you, the viewer, that we are not hovering at the edge of coma; we remain riotously alive.
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