Police

Clouzot's Quai des Orfèvres is the point of departure, though Maurice Pialat's Paris is closer to Siegel's New York (Madigan). Brute, bigot, romantic, the inspecteur (Gérard Depardieu) uses his girth like a battering ram against suspects. The case is a drug ring run by Tunisian brothers, among them is the comely runaway (Sophie Marceau) who sulks for a smoke in the holding cell. A single bullet is fired in the blur of interrogations, kidnappings and stolen money, the real action lies in the emotional give and take between denizens of parallel realms. "You're not like them." "How do you know? People say cops and crooks are alike." Horseplay and cajoling are the norm at the station, where the bloke cleared at a lineup gets his head slammed on the desk regardless. (He's later seen at a tavern offering the flatfoot who thumped him a whiskey, no hard feelings.) The detective is a groping widower, the girl is "a sealed tower," the two share an intense brush in a car at night, he drives away afterward grinning like a teenager. Navigating both sides of the law is the amiably amoral defense attorney (Richard Anconina), quick with a line ("If I were a crook, I'd like to be cuffed by you!") and quicker still when hitting on a teenage putain (Sandrine Bonnaire). Pialat hurtles through genre trappings, catalogs clusters of intercultural abrasion, slows down at a newsstand for a lingering view of a magazine reporting Truffaut's death. (He favors a rough, roving camera, but allows himself a stately pan on the couple furtively humping at the not quite deserted police headquarters.) The protagonist quotes Chardonne explicitly and Browning obliquely ("Cristina"), and is played off by Górecki's symphony. "We do our jobs right, that's all." Lumet repays the compliment to Prince of the City in Q&A. With Pascale Rocard, Jonathan Leïna, Franck Karoui, Jacques Mathou, Bernard Fuzellier, Bentahar Meaachou, and Yann Dedet.