Crime story familiar, but gives European perspective ‘The Connection’ borrows from many American classics.
Not to be too vernacular about it, but Cédric Jimenez loves him some classic post-war crime movies, several of which star Al Pacino.
On the surface, the French director’s “The Connection” — a 2014 picture now distributed by Drafthouse Films — is a riff on William Friedkin’s iconic and, admittedly, Pacino-less 1976 film “The French Connection.” It is the same story from, if you will, the other side, a saga of French law enforcement trying to smash one of the era’s most notorious heroin rings.
Except —and there’s really no getting around this — is it not 1976 anymore. While the period detail is exacting, the soundtrack is stellar and it’s shot in rich, gorgeous 35mm, there is an energy missing that all the perfect sideburns in the world can’t quite replace. “The French Connection” crackled with lightning of the contemporary. This movie is a period piece, one drawing not just from Friedkin but Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann as well.
Jean Dujardin, who picked up an Oscar as the charismatic lead in that other period piece, “The Artist,” is Pierre Michel, a police magistrate and possible former gambling addict, devoted to the junkies he leans on for information on the juvenile squad. Though he loves his wife and kids, Michel is one of those cops who is the job, even if he’s transferred to the much more dangerous Marseille, the port city that functions as a gateway for the heroin trade.
His target is the brutal kingpin Gaetan “Tany” Zampa (Gilles Lellouche), and we learn just how completely he dominates Marseille thought a popsong-soundtracked montage of being refined and enemies being shot that would make Scorsese blush. Zampa operates with impunity — executions are old-school public, shootings on streets and crowded beaches.
And much like Pacino’s relentless cop and Robert De Niro’s brilliant thief in Mann’s still-outstanding 1995 crime epic “Heat,” Jimenez emphasizes that Zampa and Michel are very much the same man, to the point where their very similar looks may confuse the heck out of American viewers — almost all of them, really — who aren’t familiar with every nook and cranny of their respective faces. Forget about the procedural and technical details Jimenez insists on presenting; in a few scenes, it is entirely possible to forget who is cop or criminal, as everyone has slicked back hair and virtually the same sideburns.
From the giant ’70s cars to the polyester suits and bulky ties, the period details are almost too good. An attempted raid on a stash house is one soundtrack selection and a few moustaches away from being the legendary video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.”
There also are traces of Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” here, especially the scenes in Zampa’s enor- mous disco called Krypton and various sequences of Zampa or his men brutalizing smaller fry. A scene in which a lowlife is forced to snort cocaine until he gives up some information feels like a canny inverse of the famous Tony-and-the-giant-pileof-coke sequence.
Which isn’t to say that “The Connection” isn’t enjoyable. Dujardin and Lellouche are note-perfect, and you just know their increasingly intense cat-and-mouse is going to end in tears. But this is an excellent cover version of a song — or songs —that crime aficionados know awfully well.