SEE HOW THEY FALL / REGARDE LES HOMMES TOMBER (64)

Directed by: Jacques Audiard

Starring: Jean Yanne, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz

The Pitch: A travelling salesman investigates the killing of his cop friend by a pair of reluctant hitmen, an ageing hood and his simple-minded young partner.

Theo Sez: All-round obscurity, difficult both to watch and to follow : lighting is harsh and usually sparse, the images often fuzzy, and the structure is so ingenious - or impenetrable - it takes a while even to realise (our only clue a cryptic intertitle) that the two strands being developed in parallel are actually about a year apart in time - one follows the aftermath of a cop's murder, the other follows the two hitmen from their first meeting until the murder. Unsurprisingly it tries the patience a little, especially since this genre (neo-noir) doesn't really lend itself to the kind of emotional insight that might justify the flashiness - it's all seething violence and existential angst ; yet there's a strangeness to it that's stimulating. It's a mixed-up, ostentatiously original movie (Audiard's follow-up, A SELF-MADE HERO, is by all accounts more straightforward) - quirky detail, like the blind woman who gets people to describe the commercials on TV for her, fits easily into this landscape of abrupt transitions and twisted relationships (the reluctant hitmen, Trintignant and Kassovitz, come off like a more specifically homoerotic version of Pozzo and Lucky from Waiting for Godot). There's even some wholly gratuitous alienation effects, like intertitles and snatches of voice-over, the better to - what, exactly (emphasise the characters' unreality? evoke the old noir conventions the film is playing with?)? Not particularly my kind of movie, but - as with recent French films as different as WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY and DON'T FORGET YOU'RE GOING TO DIE (not to mention the entire 90s oeuvre of Andre Techine) - the willingness to leave things unspoken is a pleasure in itself.