Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
The French have long fetishised the American detective genre in their films. Perhaps the greatest exponent of this was Jean-Pierre Melville who, in films like Bob le Flambeur and Le Deuxime Souffl, perfectly captured the trademarks of American gangster movies – wet night streets, raincoats with bulging pockets, gunmen lurking in dark alleys and, of course, blazing gunfire.
But Melville brought an intellectual and unmistakably Gallic angle to the simple tenets of the American thriller. His films focused on moral tangles, often dealing with divided loyalties, as well as affinities among informers, cops and criminals.
Director Jean-Luc Godard explored American movie-isms in Breathless and Alphaville. The latter was an enjoyable mix of film noir and sci-fi in which a tough gumshoe, played by Eddie Constantine, becomes an inter- galactic agent. Godard seamlessly mixed the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice with the aesthetics of detective comic strips.
There many other examples. The French even came up with a title for their distinctive use of the genre – the policier. More recently directors like Luc Besson (The Professional and Nikita) and Jean-Jacques Beniex (Diva) have kept pace with the sophistication and seamlessness of American action movies, while adding an extra dose of intelligence.
So it comes as no surprise that Jan Kounen in his directorial debut with Dobermann has taken elements of Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone and has come up with a dazzling heist thriller that literally exhausts the viewer.
Kounen has received universal acclaim for his short films and is regarded as one of France’s leading advertising directors. His radiant style, thrilling pace and breathtaking handling of camera and montage are perfectly complemented by screenwriter Joel Houssin. Dobermann is without a doubt the finest, most stylish, semi- subversive action thriller you will see this year.
The plot revolves around the eponymous hero who heads a motley gang of professional robbers. There’s the psychotic Mosquito, The Padre (who is the craziest of the bunch), Pitbull, two gypsy brothers and Dobermann’s clutch – a mute, sexy chick who specialises in high-octane explosives.
After the gang has committed a litany of heists, super-bad Inspector Christini (played to sadistic hilt by Tcheky Karyo) is assigned to the case.
What follows is a dynamic cops-and- robbers chase. But the twist of the movie is that we sympathise with the “baddies” rather than with the cop, who turns out to be the most villainous character I, for one, have seen in a while.
The police commissioner even admonishes Christini for his sadism: “When you die, you’ll have a swastika painted on your grave.”
As the action hots up, the cop, growing ever more obsessed, does loads of cocaine and gets viscerally hung-up on doing as much damage as he can to our delightful heisters.
The film has a Hispanic/Latino feel – crime, salsa and gun-flashing tango on the streets of Paris.
Kounen is Dutch, which perhaps explains the liberal use of sexuality and violence. He does, however, have all the stylistic flash of the best of French film directors.
Although Dobermann may not be as intellectually meaty as a Godard or Melville version of an American gangster pic, it’s slick and funny and has as much, if not more, style than anything Tarantino could dream up.