Un crime

"A Crime"

A crime that they actually made this into a movie that had virtually no plot, made no sense and had no ending. Made sense in the beginning made no sense in the end. Harvey Kartel's body is in great shape, for an old man. And I like Harvey, usually. Takes place in New York City in the worst areas possible. It's dark and uninteresting. Music score is so dull, as dull as the movie.

Ok... now I'm just filling space to make up the required number of characters to post a review of this sadly pointless and boring movie. Sorry, you've wasted your time reading this but worse, you may have even watched it.

That is truly a crime.

Some people might have two problems with the film: 1. It's rather old fashioned (which is a good thing in my opinion, I don't like the regular hyped mainstream trash). The plot is the kind of story that could come from a novel of Patricia Highsmith, and the look of the film is more like it's from the late 70's or early 80's. 2. The pretty complex story with a lot of strange (and maybe) almost unbelievable coincidences. And you don't get a simple positive character for identification. Exact the same way many french thrillers from the good old times were working (especially those of Clouzot). Though sometimes these films seem a bit too over-constructed (and I must admit I had this problem when I first saw Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques", 1955). But when you accept this (and life itself sometimes surprises us with strange coincidences too), you will see an excellent, very emotional thriller with great performances. You'll never know what happens next!

The three protagonists are dull and dreary; Harvey Keitel, a zen/boomerang throwing/aging taxi driver, Emmanuelle, an unemployed petty criminal/drunk( and ravishingly beautiful), who for unknown reasons is madly obsessed with Norman, an average looking depressed unemployed underground greyhound racing addict, each one living in shabby apartments. Then comes the love triangle with unsavory intenions; two characters wanting to murder the third character. At this point you flash back to Reservoir Dogs and hope they all shoot each other. I think the blame is with the director for painting such a gloomy portrait with sorry to say, POS characters. Put this in the hands of better talent it might have had a chance. (And gross more than $400,000. How pathetic.)

Vincent (Norman Reedus) is still suffering the loss of his wife killed three years ago by some psychopath taxi driver. He can't move with his life so his neighbor (Emmanuelle Béart) who has a crush on him tries to help him by trying to find this killer. Easy? Maybe. So she picks a random taxi driver (Harvey Keitel) and starts to get involved with this strange guy and she's gonna invent that this guy is really the killer of Vincent's wife. And then...

The story behind the movie "A Crime" is one of those intriguing stories where the next movement, the next step is always awaited. There are many surprises, not in that clichéd sense of plot twists, but just in the way that you can't see the obvious, it doesn't exist here. A quiet and slow paced story where the development of the characters and their actions is more important than to really know if they're gonna find the killer or what's gonna happen with Roger the taxi driver. But this is not a perfect screenplay, there's few things wrong with it (the beginning was way too fast, in one moment Vincent see his wife dead and then the movie leaps three years later; and his first moments with his neighbor are quite strange, not well explained).

But besides that the movie floats very well and leaves the viewer wanting more of it. "A Crime" runs about 100 minutes but I think that it could be more longer specially in terms of characters development (mostly Vincent), showing the previous life of the main characters and things like that because these characters are presented and we're feel like "Can we like these characters? What's their reason behind their actions"? It misses much.

The performances are good, most notably Harvey Keitel (How come this guy gets incredible roles where he has to perform erotic scenes at the age of 60? Things that even younger actors don't do frequently and I'm even comparing him with his young co-star Reedus who only has one scene with Béart and it's not even close of Keitel's seductive scenes with Béart). Béart was quite convincible in some parts as the desperate woman who wants to be with Vincent but instead she got trapped and got romantically and sexually involved with the taxi driver. I really liked Norman Reedus mysterious performance here but I wished he could have more scenes and a better character development. Most of his lines are whispered so I advise you to turn up the volume or you're probably miss what he's saying.

A surprising, effective and great film to watch. 9/10

Harvey Keitel has a sterling reputation of finding the weirdest roles possible and this is yet another one. He also has the reputation for always finding roles in which he gets to flash some skin, and again this one is no exception. Keitel plays a brutish cab driver who gets caught up in a plot of seduction and intrigue.

It's a weird story about weird people. Altho made in 2006 it certainly looks like it was made in the 70's like in the time of Taxi Driver. There's some skin in the movie. Dialogue is average so nothing special there. Seems like there could have been more to it I am sure many would find it boring.

6/10.