Serie Noire

There is in this movie one of the best scenes ever to be seen on. Deweare is outside on a parking place, in the night in the city. He shouts etc. About love. I don't remember exactly what he says, but the sadness, lostness, despair and loneliness in the city that he is expressing, the image this scene is offering has been one of my main inspirations for my artwork. This movie makes me really cry, so much it touched me in my heart. It is like a religious experience, this image of estrangement in modern lost times in the city.

Serie noire is an excellent french movie, especially because of the acting of Patrick Dewaere, unfortunately dead now. The atmosphere is noire and tough and it is impossible not to be touched by the sensibility of this personnage play by Patrick dewaere. This is one of my favourite films of the seventies.

The late seventies, the very dull east suburban area of Paris, winter, waste grounds and awful new towns in the landscape. The set is definitely a character of the film. An amazing thriller, very dark with unique characters, completely lost in their misery, although full of the little hopes of ordinary lives. The cast includes a wonderful Patrick Deweare as "Franck", a magnificent looser, and Marie Trintignant as "Mona" a desperate teenager, almost autistic. Their encounter is the lead of this bloody black romance, that will leave you, nevertheless, with an optimistic feeling...

Unique, that's the only way to describe this movie that is absolutely impossible to put in any category...it has a very very special atmosphere, which I have never seen before. Patrick Dewaere is purely awesome, outstanding, one of his best roles, unforgettable, for this adaptation of a Jim Thompson's novel that I have never read. The opening scene, with Dewaere doing calisthenics with a very old fashioned and bizarre music, this scene announces and summarizes the whole movie. Not a drama, not a crime movie, not a comedy, simply something unique. Alain Corneau makes here something that looks like a Bertrand Blier's film. Everything, characters and situations, is sordid here, everything. It's a nasty losers story, emphasized by the settings and music.

This is the second Jim Thompson adaptation I review here and it's purely coincidental. I really must love Thompson's style. I wasn't expected a masterpiece when I bought Série Noire in DVD, tho. I've always been fond of the late Patrick Dewaere, I think he is one of the best French actors ever, and I like Corneau's cinema, but Série Noire was unexpected and it is indeed extraordinary. It's daring, tense and plunged into harsh realism. It's the kind of film that stays with you once you've finished watching it. It shows how easy it is to lose control when society becomes a weight on personal identity. Série Noire is a different kind of Film Noir and probably the best French crime film among Le cercle rouge and Du Rififi chez les hommes. It has a ton of black humor and a bleak atmosphere. Corneau shoots Paris as if it was itself a character, a gloomy, grey and ruthless antagonist. The sordid locations and the moisty dirty apartments where the action takes place give a really weird and nightmarish mood to the film. The social pressure which the character is subject is huge and unbearable; it literally toys with him until he breaks. Patrick Dewaere shines like in no other films, he's brilliant as the neurotic looser who gets wrapped into this tragic vortex after the killing of an old woman. His downfall somehow reminded me of the dizzying Richard Widmark's runaway in Night and the city. Georges Perec's dialogues are just great, very similar to Michel Audiard or Bertrand Blier's style. The cast is perfect. Bernard Blier is excellent as usual and Marie Trintignant is mysterious and sensual. If you like 70's French crime films, you have to watch it, this is one of the best.