Black Tide

The two lead characters of the film 'Fleuve noir' are confronted with personal dramas and dark psychological problems, each in his own way. Police investigator Visconti carries with him the drama of complicated relationships with his son a teenager who's in trouble with drug trafickers. He is rarely awake, permanently looking for alcohol, untidy and dressed in a raincoat that rivals that of the legendary Inspector Columbo. The literature teacher Belaille hides behind the appearance of a good teacher and a happy new father hiding unfulfilled writing ambitions and character vices that make him confuse reality with gloomy imaginary fantasies. Director Erick Zonca benefited for this 2018 film from a screenplay based on a book by Israeli crime novelist Dror Mishani and two exceptional actors in the lead roles - Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris. And yet, 'Fleuve noir', despite its ambitions, manages to be only a little less than the sum of the talents that participated in the making of the film.

The story of the film is built around the investigation of the disappearance of a teenager. The elements of the police procedure are not completely absent, but are pushed into the background by the psychological aspects of the investigation. Visconti is a cop who relies primarily on intuition and rummages through the lives of those involved. The results do not take long to appear, but family conflicts, vices and psychological traumas are multiple and are gradually revealed. Repeated surprises and upheavals lead both police officers and spectators astray, and the truth - if this is the truth - is revealed only in the final scene.

The adaptation of the script to the French reality seemed successful to me, and the succession of revelations and changes of views always keeps the interest of the spectators. The excellent cinematography alternates between the police station, the dark and violent streets of Paris at night, the building where the heroes of the drama live, and the forest next to it that plays its role in the drama. The interpretations of Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris seemed a bit exaggerated to me. On a theater stage, they would be perfect, but in the film it seemed to me that the characters were embodied with an excess of mannerism, and it is precisely the key scenes in which the obsessed policeman and the suspected teacher who has many things to hide meet that do not work very well. The surprise character is played by Sandrine Kiberlaine, an actress who lives with more discretion the personal traumas of the mother of the teenager who disappeared and is searched by the police, traumas that are no less profound than those of the policeman or the teacher. The series of successive endings and the acting will make the heroes of this dark psychological thriller continue to haunt us even after the end of the screening.