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Directed by
Claude-Michel Rome (Woman Under Influence, Crossfire, Zodiac Murders 1, Murder in Mind, Ladies of the Law)
Starring
Aïssa Maïga (Bamako,Mood Indigo, Hidden)
Bernard Blancan (Days of Glory)
Moussa Maaskri (Vidocq)
Pascal Elbé (No Second Chance)
Richard Berry (22 Bullets, The Valet, Ruby & Quentin)
Zabou Breitman (The minister,The Three of Us, The First day of the rest of your life)
Production
Philippe Rousselet & Etienne Comar - Les Films de la Suane
2008 / Original language: French / Color / 2.35 / Dolby SRD / available in hd
In a spectacular operation, a gang succeeds in freeing a notorious criminal from his heavily armed escort. They dump their car in a neighborhood that local police have abandoned to dealers, mobsters and thugs.
The neglected precinct's newly appointed chief detective Vincent Drieu is intrigued by the car and other insignificant events logged in the station’s incident book. He makes connections nobody else ever saw because nobody else bothered to look.
A mysterious, charismatic figure, Drieu leads by example. He provokes jealousy, but gradually the cops on his team begin to feel like cops again.
That’s lucky, because something big, very big, is about to hit them.
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Crossfire is in the purest film noir tradition of cops and hoodlums fighting a secular battle between good and evil.
Even so, the film’s first original aspect comes from its location: St. Merrieux, an imaginary town on the banks of Lake Berre, caught between Sea and Industry, combining typical southern French landscapes and omnipresent refineries – a futuristic world, so photogenic and so rarely filmed.
The second original aspect is the station house.
Presented like a full-fledged character of the movie, the station house only has six months to live. The building is to be demolished as the industrial park engulfs the neighborhood. It’s a station full of demotivated men and women, who no longer believe in the mission they serve. But the arrival of a new Lieutenant remobilizes them, crystallizing the rebirth of a sense of duty and the lost unit’s hopes.
Lastly, Crossfire hinges on its hero, Vincent Drieu, a glowering, lonely cop, dragging behind him a secret wound and an awkward past.
Through him, the film will evoke a characteristic that is rarely dealt with in movies: FEAR. Physical fear in the face of danger; psychological fear in the face of responsibilities or dealing with the opposite sex. The classical representation of the hero is constantly and profoundly challenged. What makes a hero? What is a coward? How can you conquer fear?
Utilizing to its fullest extent the omnipresent industrial backdrop to the story, the camera will seem to capture the actors in action, testifying to their meanderings and their transformations. The camera in movement. Incisive.
The rhythm will be edgy, cranking up the tension as we head to a climax that is as surprising as it is unavoidable. Like parallel lines driven by destiny to join together eventually, as Jean-Pierre Melville said at the heart of Le Cercle Rouge.
Structured like a Western with its mythology of the lonesome hero haunted by his past and his group of men plunged into a grandiose, crepuscular adventure, Crossfire is an action movie, combined with the psychological study of the human soul in the face of danger and the instinctive fight for survival.
