A tired, raddled, alcoholic police inspector is asked to investigate the disappearance of an adolescent boy. He is convinced that the boy is just spending some time with a pretty girlfriend, but the boy's mother insists that her child is too responsible to disappear without any kind of warning. Pretty soon the inspector meets a male neighbour of the family, to wit a teacher of the well-cared-for hipster variety. The neighbour is strangely keen to share his many social, aesthetic and psychological insights with the police...
"Fleuve noir" is a thriller about deceit and self-deceit ; it is also a thriller about the moral and sexual deviance which can hide behind even the most normal-seeming of situations. It's a pretty dark and grim movie which oozes menace, alienation and misery through every pore. The pace is slow but the final revelation, near the very ending, feels somewhat rushed.
"Fleuve noir" contains two enemy protagonists, played by Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris. Both men are fine actors but here they engage in serious, serious overacting. In both cases the result looks more like a caricature than like a character : both the raddled cop and the misguided, dangerously ambitious hipster needed more realism and more nuance. It's hard to believe that no director or no fellow actor stepped in in order to point out that less can be more...
"Fleuve noir" is a thriller about deceit and self-deceit ; it is also a thriller about the moral and sexual deviance which can hide behind even the most normal-seeming of situations. It's a pretty dark and grim movie which oozes menace, alienation and misery through every pore. The pace is slow but the final revelation, near the very ending, feels somewhat rushed.
"Fleuve noir" contains two enemy protagonists, played by Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris. Both men are fine actors but here they engage in serious, serious overacting. In both cases the result looks more like a caricature than like a character : both the raddled cop and the misguided, dangerously ambitious hipster needed more realism and more nuance. It's hard to believe that no director or no fellow actor stepped in in order to point out that less can be more...