Dir: Chris Menges
Star: Daniel Auteuil, Ciarán Hinds, Marianne Denicourt, Nastassja Kinski
With the recent, ongoing scandal in the UK over paedophile sex rings run by the powerful, this film has acquired a topical aspect not present on its original release. Based on the novel of the same name by Eric Leclere (available as a free download from the publisher), it’s the story of somewhat scuzzy private eye Xavier Lombard, who had to abandon his job as a Parisian cop under murky circumstances, and is now operating out of London. He’s contacted by a former colleague in the French force, Carlos (Hinds), who is now working for the wealthy Spitz family – as well as married to their daughter, Deborah (Kinski). They are in need of Xavier’s services, because the family scion, Leon, has vanished without trace. This might just be his drug habit kicking in, but when Xavier tracks down Leon’s very scared girlfriend, it becomes apparent the waters are a great deal murkier than personal addiction.
The girlfriend gives Xavier a video tape, that starts out as an innocent fairy-tale, before suddenly becoming something far more sordid. He discovers Leon, a photographer, had rescued a young boy from a child sex ring, and sent him to the safety of his girlfriend, before vanishing entirely off the grid. With the help of a high-class call-girl he knew in Paris (Denicourt), our hero poses as a paedophile interested in the ring’s “product”, and finds himself crawling down into the sewers of that appalling and highly suspect, world. It’s a journey which will take him from London to Mexico and back, expose his past and put his friends in serious danger, because the people that run this kind of thing do not take kindly to outsiders. Especially when, like Lombard, they are trying to interfere with their highly lucrative business, or worse yet, expose it to any kind of public scrutiny. Even when the Spitz’s fire him, after discovering the nature of his Parisian history, Xavier won’t quit until he finds and stops both Friedman (Bruce Greenwood), the man behind the ring and ‘The Austrian’, the worst paedophile of them all.
All told, this is probably a movie which is better at descending into hell than in climbing out of it, reaching its likely nadir, emotionally, in a scene where Xavier has just rescued another victim of the ring, only to be confronted with a dead body of someone he knows. The difference in reactions between him and the boy, the latter completely burned-out of all human emotion, is utterly chilling; he just stands there, playing Tetris on his hand-held console, while that catchy little electronic ditty plays. I’ve now had the tune stuck in my brain for about the past three days, which keeps reminding me of the movie. And it’s not the kind of film you want to be reminded of, because it’s dealing with possibly the nastiest of topics, in a fairly unflinching and generally disturbing way.
Less convincing is the way Xavier turns into some kind of Charles Bronson, Death Wish, wannabe, trotting the globe to clean up the mean streets of Nogales, where Friedman has a farm devoted to his “cash crop.” The problem is, we first see Xavier following a man’s wife. When he finds out she is indeed having an affair, rather than reporting to his client, the husband, he blackmails the woman, causing her to conclude, “You’re not a very nice person.” Since it seems she’s right, his transformation into a moralistic avenging angel seems forced. Yes, his Parisian history and the events of the film provide a certain justification for it; however, there’s no obvious point at which he is faced with putting aside his previous self-interest, and it just happens, which renders it some way short of ringing true. He either needs to be more altruistic to begin with, which would likely ring false to the original source, or go through a bigger arc to get to the point where personal safety is no longer a concern.
According to the novel, Deborah is “as proud as her looks and as cold as the family’s money,” and Kinski certainly delivers on both those counts, playing the haughty, well-off daughter, whose relationships, both with her brother and her husband, are more complex than they initially seem. She attempts to take a moral stand against Xavier, citing his history as proof of his unsuitability for the task, but by this stage, he has his suspicions about her hidden agenda, and (as shown above) doesn’t fall for it. Right up to the end, the questions remain with regard to Deborah; how much does she actually know about what is going on? Is she the innocent she professes to be? As characters go, it’s one of her smaller roles, yet is certainly pivotal to proceedings, and helps to illustrate that outward appearance is no guide to true moral character.
Director Menges is better known as a cinematographer, having won an Academy Award for his work on The Killing Fields, and also worked for the likes of Neil Jordan, Sean Penn and Ken Loach. While he unquestionably brings a photographer’s eye to proceedings, he avoids the trap, which I’ve seen a few times with cinematographers turned directors, over valuing style over substance; it perhaps helped that this was his fourth (and so far, final) film as director. There’s a feeling of Gallic intensity to this, obviously powered by Auteuil, in his first fully-English language role, though it extends to the overall feel. Not quite sure about the Irish Hinds playing a supposed Brazilian. Still, all told, this is a solid piece of new noir, picking away the scab on a thoroughly unpleasant aspect of society, and doing so without resorting to sensationalism.
