Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I hate it when you guys pick on the foreign contributors to the site for their English skills. It’s shitty and you seem to be missing the point. Great cinema isn’t just happening here in the US. It’s happening on every corner of the globe, all the time, and the whole point of the site has always been trying to cast as wide a net as possible for cool movie news. You never know where the next truly classic film is going to come from, so it seems really small-minded to be dismissive of foreign cinema, or of the people who take the time to send us reports of some of the films they’re seeing now that we won’t get a peek at for years. Bobby Dupea may not write with flawless English syntax, but who cares? He seems to be well connected in terms of the French film scene, and he’s always got his eye out for something cool. Sounds like this time he might have found it, too...
Hi Harry & Company!
Better news from Paris, France. And from Vincent Cassel.
One week after seeing him in Jan Kounen’s overly ambitious depiction of his own Shaman experiences, hiding out under the title of BLUEBERRY, Vincent is back – both Irreversibles are back! – as French spies in a superbly made espionage thriller from Frederic Schoendoerffer – who made a similarly expert slice of almost documentary action about cops and serial killers in SCENES DE CRIME in 2000.
His new title is AGENTS SECRETS. Obviously that means SECRET AGENTS. But stick to the French title because that's what this superb movie is about. French agents. As the director says we all know certain tales about the CIA, MI6 and Mossad, but damn little about the ultra-secret French secret service. It, too, has initials: DGSE for Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (or: General Directorate for External Security). It’s part of the Defense Ministry, and responsible for military and electronic intelligence, strategic information and counterespionage outside French borders
Many of us know one DGSE tale. And it ain’t good.
What started as “Operation Satanic” ended up as “Underwatergate.” This was the infamous sinking of Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace flagship, in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand on July 19, 1985, resulting in the death/murder of Portuguese-born photographer Fernando Pereira. He was rescuing his cameras when the first blast ripped a hole the size of a garage door in the engine room. The explosion was so powerful that a freighter on the other side of the wharf was thrown five metres sideways.
Two of the team, undercover as honeymooners, were caught, charged with murder and arson. They pleaded guilty to manslaughter and wilful damage and got 10 years apiece. The UN made France pay Greenpeace $7 million in return for the couple being moved to a French Polynesian army base for three years. Instead, they were home in two – and promoted!
Considering how rotten the Rainbow Warrior affair was for the image of France (well, some French hailed the saboteurs as heroes), Schoendoerffer boldly uses a similar mission to kick off his film. Four agents and a “guardian angel” are dispatched to Casablanca, Morocco (the DGSE sent 13 agents to New Zealand but secret services have bigger budgets) to blow up a ship carrying arms to “put the brakes” on an arms dealer.
Cassel and Bellucci run the operation. Sergio Perris Mencheta and Ludovic Schoendoerffer (the director’s brother) are the divers attaching mines to the vessel. Eric Savini is their minder. (His profile is astonishingly like St. Sean Connery's).
Unlike New Zealand, everything goes like clockwork... until, arriving in Geneva, Monica is hauled off by the Swiss Customs and found to have (unknown to her) a stash of coke in her bag. Strip-search... and jail! Seeing all this, Cassel adroitly makes sure he’s not next. Once back in Paris, he calls Mencheta – who's shot dead by a blonde dyke seconds before Cassel knocks at his hotel door.
“Operation Genesis” has turned – what else as this is not merely politics, but French politics entering the scene - into “Operation Betrayal.”
The shit hits the fan and we watch, entranced, as Vincent cleans it up, helped by Ludovic. Somehow, no one has got to thm. Indeed, no one seems to know where these agents live (or hide-out).... which doesn’t say much for the French secret service, does it?
There’s some great action scenes, Cassel fighting with hit-bitch Najwa Nimri, a stupendous car crash. Yet this is not a caper for Bruce Willis, much less Commander Bond. We’re closer here to John Le Carre than Ian Fleming; Schoendoerffer reads them all and quizzes ex-agents from France and Israel.
There are no science fiction gizmos, only real ones like the bicycle pump turned into a gun, and that’s made by an agent in the field, not a Q at base camp (A cycle pump gun was first used back in the 70s).
And Monica is no Bond babe. (She’d eat Brosnan alive - lucky him!) “For the first time,” she says, “I’ve got a role that has nothing to do with my figure or with seduction.” She plays a professional spy inexplicably behind bars in Switzerland. You want out? Simple! Kill this other prisoner for us.
(Must say, the Swiss didn’t only invent the cuckoo clock – they have exceedingly classy jails, if Monica’s cell is anything to go by. Though I know exactly what mayhem the guys in OZ would cause with the wall mirrors and metal toilet-roll holders!)
Cassel and Bellucci are colleagues, friends; no more, no less. Even being French, they have no room, no time, no need for sex in their lives together. OK, unlike Janet and her Jackson Two, Monica flashes both of her belluccis - but a strip-search has zilch to do with sex.
After his discussions with real agents Schoendoerffer gives both Cassels the same nightmare – of free-falling. An obvious metaphor for fear of being dropped in the shit by their superiors. In Cassel’s case, his chute doesn’t open as he sky-dives and, yes, it is the real Vincent dropping in the real sky (the insurance companies were furious) unlike Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991).
Cassel is every bit as tough, tenacious, resilient and resourceful as the film, which has a strong script (from ten hands in all) that is never afraid of tense chapters in Hitchcockian silence and... well, I’ve not said this about any French film since, maybe, the 99 magic minutes of DELICATESSEN in 1991 - it all ends far too soon. I was looking forward for another hour!
It’s a BLADE RUNNER finish because, quite simply, there’s no room for the vengeance we’d all love to see explode the gonads of DSGE boss, Andre Dussollier and his political master, Bruno Todeschini. That just does not happen in real life. Not even in Le Carre.
At a time when on both sides of the pond, enquiries are afoot about not only the quality of secret intel but how governments decide to use it to suit their agendas, this is a fascinating look at political duplicity. Agents are mere pawns moved across the global chessboard by their chiefs, although it soon becomes apparent that the chiefs are scared of or never trust their pawns. If they can do all this to others, they could stick it - in one way or another, disclosure or death - to us. Hell, let’s drop them in it or just take ’em out!
Frederic, the director, and Ludovic, the actor (they are also two of the five scripters) are sons of director Pierre Schoendoerffer, responsible for the finest of French war films: A CAPTAIN’S HONOR, DRUMMER-CRAB, THE ANDERSON PATROL, 317th PLATOON, etc. As seen already in SCENES DE CRIME (it starred Dussollier and Charles Berling, who stars here in the great pre-credit sequence, except it’s after the credits), Frederic has the same hunger for research, attention to detail and cold, in your face irony.
All this in a tight ‘n’ taut 109 minutes. Beginning with a close-up of the dark side of the Moon, first of many oustanding visual effects from the team at Mac Guff Ligne (you say: McGuffin!), which did BLUEBERRY. It’s another Schoendoerffer metaphor... for the world of espionage.
Vincent loves his rigorous style, “he’s a film-maker totally possessed by his subject, an absolute perfectionist.” Monica agrees, which is why she hid her fears and did her own stunts (like swimming in high seas). “You have to surpass yourself to satisfy Frederic’s demands.”
Sadly, this is last film starring both courageous Cassels for a year or more. They’re both working like stink, just not in the same projects.
We’ll see Vincent next in Paul McGuigan’s THE RECKONING with Paul Bettany, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox... Then, Georgie-boy’s OCEAN’S TWELVE, but not as Paris papers figured, as the French baddy, but “the world’s best burglar”... then, BABYLONE BABIES for Mathieu Kassovitz, their first together since LES RIVIERES POURPRES (THE CRIMSON RIVERS) in 2000... and finally (what a year!), Vincent produces and headlines LE SHATAN (devil in Arabic) for Kim Chapiron, part of what Cassel calls a gang of young movie-mad guys changing the face/pace of shorts and rock videos. (This group includes Costa-Gavras’ son Romain).
Monica is on her way in VOL DE CIGOGNES (FLIGHT OF STORKS) from the book by Jean-Christophe Grange (author of LES RIVIERES POURPRES) directed by Gilles Mimouni, who, of course, first introduced Vincent to Monica and made them stars in in L’APARTEMENT in 1996. Monica is also Terry Gilliam’s Queen Mirror in THE BROTHERS GRIMM and a Mafia overlord’s lesbian daughter in Spike Lee’s SHE HATE ME.
Yes, yes of course, there is a website and there’s an unofficial DGSE site right here.
Over and out from Bobby Dupea
Thanks, Bobby. This sounds great.
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