La French (2014)

I think that I've watched "The French Connection" (and its sequel) like 3-4 times until I was 14-15 years old. I remember nothing. Just that at that time I liked it, and for a while was my first reference for Gene Hackman. When I heard for the first time about "The French" I didn't get that's set in the same context. I only understood that when I've seen the English title: "The Connection".

A bit of trivia. The period: '60s-'80s; the path: Turkey - South of France - New York; the context: one of the best organized networks specialized in heroin traffic. In brief, opium growing was still legal in Turkey at the time, the raw product was shipped to Corsica and Marseilles, and then refined as final drug and exported in the USA. The history of "the connection" goes back in time before WW2, involving a bunch of interconnected clans. All the story has obviously many episodes that fit to a movie, and "La French" just picks one of these, toward the end of the period, when after years the DEA in the US and the French police were slowly getting close to an end with disbanding the network. And like that we get to know Pierre Michel, a judge in Marseilles specialized on juvenile matters. One day he gets a promotion to organized crime, and obviously the first case he gets is the "La French" problem. Not for long though. After some success in his investigation leading up to the mayor's office he's quickly taken off the case. That's the extremely brief summary for the first part of the movie. For the second, I wouldn't give any spoilers...

...But unfortunately the beginning of the movie it's telling you almost too clearly where all this is going. Anyway, the build-up of the action is relatively slow, surprisingly calm and realistic for the subject it has. Especially since the production design helps a lot = everything looks really authentic for the time it's set in (the cars, the music, the locations, etc.). The script drives you from work matters to their effects in the personal life, so we have also quite some drama packed in, which sort of saves the movie of extra senseless action scenes (it doesn't mean we don't have action). On the other hand, the characters, who are real persons - Pierre Michel (Jean Dujardin) and Tany Zampa (Gilles Lellouche), the local drug lord - are taken to the level of some sort of sort of extremely gritty cold war, stuff that somehow seems a bit artificial. But well... it's a movie, it's not meant to put you to sleep :) Finally, I could say it's a solid movie, but I can't say it left me such an impression to motivate re-watching it 3-4 times as with "The French Connection". However, I'm not 15 years old anymore, and I neither have the time I had back then ;).

Rating: 3.5 out of 5