Flic Story

1975
Adel Productions
Director: Jacques Deray
Length: 107 min.
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 2 February

Even though it is based on a true story, Jacques Deray's Flic Story employs most of the usual crime film cliches. Nothing really new is presented, and yet, the film is still enjoyable, mostly because the performances by the leads, the always super-cool Alain Delon and Jean-Louis Trintignant, are in top-form.

Delon plays his "super-cop" as a quiet and good-natured man. He loves his wife and his job, and deplores cops who work above the law (he gets after his men for roughing up suspects. Though usually Delon plays tough-as-nails characters in films of this genre, here we see another side of him and he pulls it off very well. Trintignant plays the villain, Buisson, a stone-faced psycho-killer. Trintignant's performance is truly chilling; his stare is enough to make us nervous for anyone else in the frame with him. Their scenes together towards the end where they meet and begin to understand each other are nicely handled by Deray and the script which he co-wrote with Alphonse Boudard.

Though it's nothing we haven't seen before, Flic Story is still a solid French crime film, and worth seeing for the cat-and-mouse between Delon and Trintignant.