Without Apparent Motive

In the city of Nice, in the beautiful and sunny French Riviera, a sniper cold-heartedly assassinates four people in less than 48 hours. There isn't an obvious connection between the victims, but since they are all upper-class society members, chief-commissioner Carella senses a lot of pressure to catch the killer fast and to prevent further murders from happening.

It's been such a long since I watched a good old-fashioned, authentic giallo! Okay, so "Without Apparent Motive" is French instead of Italian, and a sniper rifle isn't exactly a traditional giallo murder weapon, but still I feel it qualifies as a bona fide giallo! After all, many delicious trademarks are well-represented, like the convoluted whodunit plot, a mysterious but merciless killer, a struggling police commissioner and many gorgeous women. Dominique Sanda, Carla Gravina and especially Stéphane Audran look lethal and incredibly seductive in their roles.

Although named "Without Apparent Motive", the assassin certainly has a motive for the murders he/she commits, and the gradual and suspenseful revelation of the motive is definitely the strongest quality of the movie. Trintignant plays in his very own typical love-or-hate-him style. I always wonder if he just acts arrogant, or really is arrogant. The locations and scenery are amazing, the great Ennio Morricone wrote another fantastic score, and many sequences are masterfully photographed.

... Nice (impossible to miss that title, hey Hugh and JJ?)

If Philippe Labro isn't a great film noir director like Melville or Corneau, his polars are however entertaining. There are some very fine scenes in "Sans Mobile Apparent", pop and sexy like an italian criminal movie. In fact, it's quite close to giallo, with a terrible secret surrounding the killings in that privileged town of Nice, but these killings are made with a rifle by a sniper. Philippe Labro was mainly a journalist and he covered the most well known sniper story, Kennedy's killing. Labro loved guns and rifles, we feel it in this movie.



What bothers me is that Labro shot that polar as a cinephile, giving Trintignant some Bogart gestures like Godard with Belmondo in "Breathless", and those few new wave quotes are rather painful to me, Trintignant's character should have been more worked, he is too much stereotyped, sometimes being too much without explanation. But the sulfurous 70s atmosphere is great, the girls are sexy (Audran, Sanda, Gravina) and master Morricone's score is sumptuous.

Philippe Labro must love "the Sniper" by Edward Dmytryk.

An exceptional movie construction, masterminding the script, the actors, the music and the location. Each scene, per day and murder, and each actor's performance leave vivid pictures in my mind: the plunge in the swimming-pool, the deceived look of Gravina in her love-sex affair with Trintignant, the full power run of Trintignant around the Nice harbor, the final death posture of the murderer. Jean-Louis Trintignant camps a local French Riviera inspector, very self-image oriented as are most of the featured residents of the Cote d'Azur. A series of murders with no evident link is followed by Trintignant, each one filling a piece of the puzzle and bringing him closer to the murderer. Labro, the film director, shoots real-street-life and picks up the best essence of each of his actors. Beyond Trintignant, each other actor seems to have the second role while playing their cast with their own personality. Labro could have been another Jean-Pierre Melville and his magnificent "Le Cercle Rouge". This "Sans Mobile Apparent" showed all the promising ingredients needed by the French cinema to find a respected place in action movies. Labro followed up with "l'Heritier", not bad, far not as good, the magic having disappeared. My biggest regret: "Sans Mobile Apparent" is as yet unavailable in DVD and does not play on TV anymore.

The movie is based on a book by McBain. Never having read the book I can't comment on the fidelity of the adaptation. However, the movie deals with some themes dear to McBain's heart : the difficulty and responsibility of detective work ; the speed at which a problem can turn into a circus, a stampede or a political affair ; the difficulty of policing a modern city where almost all citizens (good or bad) can hide, morph and reinvent themselves. (If you're living in a large city : would you be willing to swear that the kindly gentleman sitting on a park bench and feeding the pigeons is indeed a retired high school teacher, and not an Israeli spy master or a judo instructor kicked out of the Navy Seals for excessive brutality ?) There is also a nicely satirical edge to the work.

The translation to French society works well and the sun-drenched city of Nice is nicely juxtaposed with the relentlessly "noir" atmosphere. The masterful Morricone music evokes a general sense of wrongness and menace.

It should be noted that Trintignant's inspector Carella is not an agreeable man : he alternates between gruff boorishness and solitary misanthropy, while exuding a smoldering, barely contained anger. One senses that any pimply teenager foolish enough to go "oink, oink" in his vicinity would become the owner of a bullet through the brain in two minutes flat. As an approach to community police work this would not be entirely without merit - but still.

Jean Louis Trintignant is terrific in this well-plotted and stylish thriller. An investigation of apparently motiveless murders really hits close to home when the former mistress of the detective becomes a victim just minutes after talking to him. The solution to the murders is utterly logical and utterly surprising. Trintgnant has the same magnetic screen presence he had in "Z", but here he actually gets to do things like deliver lines! Dominique Sanda provides the eye-candy. For my money, this was one of the two best thrillers of 1972, the other being Hitchcock's "Frenzy." It doesn't appear to be available on videotape, but if you get a chance to see it, don't miss it.