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Film: The Round Up
Year of production: 2010
UK Release date: 17th June 2011
Distributor: Revolver
Certificate: TBC
Running time: 115 mins
Director: Rose Bosch
Starring: Jean Reno, Mélanie Laurent, Gad Elmaleh, Raphaëlle Agogué, Hugo Leverdez
Genre: Drama/History/War
Format: Cinema
Country of Production: France/Germany/Hungary
Language: French/German/Yiddish
Review by: Qasa Alom
The bar has been set mighty high for films concerning the persecution of Jews during the Second World War by the likes of Schindler’s List, The Pianist and Au Revoir Les Enfants. In more recent times, even the warped brilliance of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds has managed to treat the harrowing topic in a different and fresh manner. Thus it’s hard to have imagined how The Round Up (La Rafle) could compare. However by using two-and-a-half years of intense research, eye witness accounts and a stellar cast, former investigative journalist Rose Bosch’s picture brings lost memories back to life to make it essential viewing.
Set in 1942’s Paris, the film begins with Joseph Weismann, played by 12-year-old newcomer Hugo Leverdez, forced to go to school with a yellow star sewn onto the breast of his jacket. Met by just as much derision as sympathy, he and most of the Parisian Jews – from both affluent as well as more modest backgrounds – are forced to take refuge in the hills in Montmartre.
Rumours, anxiety and hardship are all rife in the air until, finally, on the night of the 16th July, their worst fears come true and the French police, with the country under the occupation of the Nazis, arrest over 13,000 Jews and cram them all into the Winter Velodrome. Some of them, such as 12-year-old Anne Traube, manage to escape through a mixture of cunning, good fortune and the compassion of French civilians; however, the rest, such as Jo and his family, face the appalling conditions, limited supplies and non-existent sanitation in the enormous gym before being transferred to prisoner camps.
To help the Jews in any form possible, volunteer nurse Annette Monod (played by Inglorious Basterds’ femme fatale Mélanie Laurent) acts as the imprisoned population’s very own Florence Nightingale and forms a strong connection with Jewish doctor David Sheinbaum (Jean Reno).
After the decision to transfer all the captives to the Beaune La Rolande prisoner camp is made, Monod decides to go with them in order to keep as many of the adults and children alive as possible…
The film is shot in an elegant and straightforward style that does not override its content at any point. The constant use of extreme close-ups and lingering static shots renders it easier for the viewer to see what the characters are feeling in a subtle manner without making the picture too word-heavy and bogged down. Much of this can be attributed to Bosch drawing on Roman Polanski for inspiration.
Moreover, Bosch stays true to her research and her chief eye witness’s (Joseph Weisman) account by filming the whole picture from the eye level of a child. This minor alteration, coupled with the hints of nostalgic sepia tone to the picture, transmits a powerful sense of innocence to the viewer about the atrocities they are witnessing, which ultimately enable them to follow the story through the eyes of somebody who lived it.
The only technical extravagance comes in the Winter Velodrome scene that lies at the crux of the film. A long craning CGI intense shot begins by following one person navigate the stadium, concentrating on small details such as children laughing, old women’s faces or police whistling, and ends by slowly zooming out to show the chaotic magnitude of having 13,000 people crammed into one venue.
Whilst the cinematography is generally settled and passive, the same cannot be said about the use of music. The haunting ethereal use of strings throughout the story is a clever tool to direct the viewer’s emotions and is quite reminiscent of Spielberg’s usage in Schindler’s List. The real masterstroke comes with the final scene of the film that for once befits the use of Debussy’s beautiful ‘Claire de Lune’. The soft and tender notes dance with the final pictures in a manner that can only be described as magical.
However, ultimately, it is the characters that bring the film alive and raise it to the level of something more than a historical drama. With an ensemble cast of over seventy speaking roles in the film that covers three different narrative worlds, it would have been very easy to get lost. However, Bosch intertwines the political tussles of Pétain and Hitler with the various personal story arcs of the Jewish community, as well as casting a light on the dilemma for many French Civilians with ease – we even pause for some more poignant moments without making the film’s pace uneven or stilted.
Many of the standout performances are from characters that only appear in a few scenes, such as the French firemen who work tirelessly to make sure every person gets a cup of water; the angelic orphan boy Nono who doesn’t understand what is happening to him; and the sinister camp Marshall, played by Denis Menochet (another actor from Inglorious Basterds), who points out the Jews hiding under his floorboards to Colonel Hans Landa.
The Round Up is a tremendous achievement that has ensured that one of occupied France’s worst crimes is not forgotten. Indeed, with almost half of the initial 3 million viewers in France being under 20 years old, it’s clear that the film has managed to combine intensive research and dedication to real life stories with a beautiful narrative structure that just about permits it to sit side by side with The Pianist and Schindler’s List. QA
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Film: 22 Bullets
Release date: 31st January 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 115 mins
Director: Richard Berry
Starring: Jean Reno, Kad Merad, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Marina Fois, Gabriella Wright
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Studio: Anchor Bay
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France
Jean Reno returns to the kind of sensitive tough guy role which gained him worldwide fame in Leon in the early-90s. Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s novel based on real life crime in the Marseille underworld, L’Immortel, inspired the character of Charly Matteï - a one-time gangster who reforms for the sake of a quiet life with his wife and family.
Three years into his retirement from crime, and seemingly safely cocooned in the peace of family life, Charly Matteï is ambushed and gunned down in an underground car park in Marseille’s old port by masked gunmen, his body ravaged by the 22 bullets of the title. Remarkably, he survives to take revenge upon his would-be killers.
The briefly explicated back-story reveals that Charly Matteï had fallen in love with someone equally entangled in the Marseille underworld, a woman under the control of both a violent pimp and her own drug addiction. Extricating her from both, he turned his back on crime’s empty rewards of power and money in order to create a safe and peaceful way of life for his new family. But retirement from the fragile hierarchy, and secret loyalties of the city’s criminal society was clearly never to be as simple as he had hoped.
Charly’s resolution to remove himself and his family from the perils of the underworld inevitably gives way to his instinct to take revenge upon those who have betrayed him, his blood drenched vendetta destined to stain the sun bleached streets of Marseille…
The character of Charly Matteï was apparently inspired by a real life Marseille crime lord Jacques Imbert, who suffered a similarly vicious attack yet lived to tell the tale, earning himself the nickname of The Immortal. The film’s writer and director used this incident and other material from Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s novel as his initial inspiration, augmenting this with his own research carried out in the Marseille underworld. It is a pity, then, that so little of anything distinctive or remarkable survives in either the script or the plot. The film is full of generic and predictable motifs from the mafia film genre – from a lame interrogation scene culminating in the victim’s body falling to the floor in slow motion, to the uneasy bonhomie of a birthday celebration for one of the gangsters - the excess of drugs and drink finding its inevitable ending in a bloodbath.
The actors deserve better than this script. Reno’s irrefutable charisma is given few chances to shine, but takes flight in a handful of scenes where his understated menace puts the thrill into the thriller. A rare humorous scene, Matteï in monologue with a cat, allows Reno to show the character’s humane side in a more original context than the rather schmaltzy scenes of family togetherness.
Marina Foïs provides the other standout performance as the police investigator attempting to break the code of silence surrounding the criminal fraternity, and facing apathetic and political opposition from her own police chief. Her finely understated and, in the main, unsentimental performance is undermined by the banality of the script. When Matteï proposes that she let him walk in order to set a trap for his would-be killer, she counters with the lame line: “I have a tough job to do” – as an exposition of the shadowy moral complexities faced by an investigator implicated by her association with a known criminal, it’s hardly thought provoking.
There are other potentially strong performances that are undermined by the blandness of the script and the predictability of the plot. Kad Merad as the current Mafia boss, a close ally of Mattei since childhood; or Jean-Pierre Darroussin, playing the inevitably morally compromised role of lawyer to organised crime lords. As for Matteï’s current wife, and indeed his first wife who also makes a number of very brief appearances, these are cardboard cut-out parts. Considering that Matteï is supposed to have turned his back on the brotherly bonds of his crime family in order to be with his wife, her part is horribly underwritten.
The other great omission of the film is the underuse of Marseille as a distinctive location. There is the odd shot which gives a sense of the place – the bare bones bleached-ness of a hillside graveyard, the exotically striped facade of the cathedral reflected in the windows of a passing car, or the medieval squalor of rubbish bags piled up in a market place. These intermittently appealing scenes only emphasise the film’s general lack of visual impact. A director of such a film might argue that pretty-pretty aesthetics are not appropriate to the subject – but higher quality cinematography could legitimately be used here to heighten dramatic effect. One scene takes as its setting the industrial backdrop of an oil refinery; the sense of horror of the torture and murder that take place here could have been heightened by better use of the starkly lit alienation of the refinery’s towers lit up against the night sky, but poor cinematography reduces the impact of the scene.
The underwhelming sense of menace is in part due to the cartoonish characterisation of the evil henchmen – again, an inevitable result of predictable plotting and woefully underwritten dialogue. As the villains drive past Matteï following a further failed attempt on his life, there is the merest suggestion of a phantom fist shaking and the words, “I’ll get you, Penelope Pitstop”. Considering how certain actions in the film are – the peppering of Matteï’s body with bullets, boiling water being poured over his face, someone’s head being repeatedly slammed with a car door – the violence appears curiously bloodless and insipid, reflecting the blinkered morality of the reformed Matteï. The hypocrisy of his personal ethics is challenged towards the end of the film, but the challenge lacks the subtlety that could have made this a disturbing and thought provoking examination of a troubled conscience.
22 Bullets has a fine premise – the moral consequences inherent in a reformed criminal trying to turn his back upon the violence and degradation of his former life, and whether such a way of life can be consigned to the past. The calibre of the acting talent is underused by the script and plot, while the setting of Marseille could have been used to much stronger effect to reflect the harshness and beauty of the film’s feudal moral code. Given the promise of its concept and cast, the film disappoints. KR
22 Bullets, starring Jean Reno (Leon) and directed by Richard Berry (The Black Box), is a thriller inspired by the real-life events in the world of the Marseille Mafia. Sharing writing duties with Berry is Irène writer Eric Assous.
Charly Matteï has turned his back on his life as an outlaw. For the last three years, he's led a peaceful life devoting himself to his wife and two children. Then, one winter morning, he's left for dead in the parking garage in Marseille's Old Port, with 22 bullets in his body.
Against all the odds, he doesn't die...
Film: 22 Bullets
Release date: 31st January 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 113 mins
Director: Richard Berry
Starring: Jean Reno, Kad Merad, Marina Pois, Jean-Pierre Darroussin
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Studio: Anchor Bay
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France
Special Features:
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Interviews
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22 Bullets in Marseille
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Making of
•
Original French trailer
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Theatrical trailer
Film: The Crimson Rivers
Release date: 26th November 2001
Certificate: 15
Running time: 101 mins
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Starring: Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel, Nadia Farès, Dominique Sanda, Karim Belkhadra
Genre: Crime/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Sony
Format: DVD
Country: France
The Crimson Rivers (Les Rivières Pourpres), based on the best selling French novel of the same name by Jean-Christophe Grangé (who also co-wrote the screenplay) is an unabashed attempt to make a French Hollywood-style thriller.
A mutilated body, tied in the foetal position and missing both its eyes and hands, turns up high in the French Alps. Super detective Pierre Niemans (Reno) is called in to investigate, enlisting local glaciologist Fanny Ferreira (Farès) to help him understand the extreme conditions in which the body was found.
Meanwhile in the town of Sarzac, Detective Inspector Max Kerkerian (Cassel) investigates his own mystery, the desecration of a young girl’s tomb and apparent theft of her body. Kerkerian pursues the case, desperate to find any information he can about the girl, but somebody seems to be erasing her from history, and nobody is giving any answers.
The two cases soon become intertwined, and the reluctant duo team up to begin an unsettling tour of the local university, where everyone seems just a little too perfect, and the nearby town, where everyone seems the complete opposite. Something’s very wrong in this quiet mountain town, kept afloat by the all powerful university, but what Niemans and Kerkerian discover will horrify even these two hardened detectives…
The Crimson Rivers starts so well, an intriguing and atmospheric police story that unsettles initially with the gruesomely mutilated bodies, then, once the conspiracy begins, draws you in with a compelling plot.
Where The Crimson Rivers really excels is in its aesthetic department. As with La Haine, director Mathieu Kassovitz creates a striking visual aesthetic - a stunning pallet on which to play out his macabre tale, with blood red playing out against an overwhelmingly snow white landscape. The model effects of the mutilated corpses are unnervingly realistic, with the production team producing the grimmest representation they could - particularly during the opening credits, where the camera investigates and probes every minute detail of the first corpse.
The score is haunting and sits with the big budget aesthetics perfectly, recalling John Carpenter’s classic Halloween, so instantly recognisable as a chilling accompaniment to the horrific events being investigated.
Reno is perfectly cast as the constantly exhausted Commissaire Niemans. It seems Reno has become typecast as a cop, even within his native France, so he’s not really stretching himself. Vincent Cassel, at this time poised on the cusp of international superstardom, deliverers a frantic performance that runs in parallel to Reno’s slow and methodical Niemans. The pair truly gel together onscreen and are a joy to watch playing off each other’s opposite personalities. Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel carry the movie with their performances, but the plot unfortunately does descend into the realm of lunacy.
Thematically drawing heavily on the works of Fincher, De Palma and Hitchcock, The Crimson Rivers makes no apologies for its Hollywood influences, instead it revels in the style, but this sees the early promise descend into a run-of-the-mill Hollywood action movie. Cassel, for his part, is involved in perhaps the most bizarrely out of place scene in the film, a kung-fu battle between himself and a gang of skinheads. This scene, with its use of video game aesthetics, feels so superfluous to the film.
Another problem is that for all the interesting ideas and larger conspiracies alluded to, the film doesn’t deliver with its grand finale - a cop-out that leaves the viewer feeling short changed.
The Crimson Rivers is highly watchable as a popcorn police thriller. It’s just such a pity that the film is let down by its final third after producing an initially compelling plot line. CSA
