Police

Police (1985)

Mangin, a police inspector in Paris, leans hard on informants to get evidence on three Tunisian brothers who traffic in drugs. He arrests one, Simon, and his girl-friend Noria. Simon's brothers go to their lawyer. He springs Noria, who promptly steals 2 million francs that belong to the Tunisians. They suspect her of the theft; her life as well as the lawyer's is in danger. Meanwhile, Noria is playing with both the lawyer and Mangin's affections. Mangin is mercurial anyway: intimidating and bloodying suspects, falling for a police commission trainee before flipping for Noria, wearing his emotions on his sleeve. Can he save the lawyer and Noria, and can he convince her to love?

Date of release
1985-09-04
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (129)
Runtime
1h 53m
Genres
Drama, Crime
Director
Maurice Pialat

Casting

Interesting facts

Police is a 1985 French neo noir crime drama film directed by Maurice Pialat and starring Gérard Depardieu, Sophie Marceau, and Sandrine Bonnaire. Written by Catherine Breillat, the film is about a moody, jaded police detective investigating a drug ring who falls for a mysterious woman and is drawn into a shady and dangerous scheme. The film had 1,830,970 admissions in France.

Production

Police was Maurice Pialat's second film with Gérard Depardieu. The two had made Loulou in 1980, but their working relationship had been difficult and they had parted inamicably. Pialat, however, sought to reconcile with the actor and rekindle their partnership.

Pialat originally wished to adapt the American crime novel Bodies Are Dust, by P. J. Wolfson. As the project evolved, the idea of ​​an adaptation was abandoned after Pialat came to feel that the transposition of the American story into a French context did not work. Seeking realism, Pialat asked his screenwriter, Catherine Breillat, to immerse herself in the lives of actual police officers.

Pialat wished to cast Sandrine Bonnaire, who had starred in his previous film À Nos Amours, in the main female role. However, scheduling issues led Bonnaire to be replaced by Sophie Marceau as the female lead. To compensate, Pialat cast Bonnaire in a supporting part, though the actress was ultimately frustrated by her limited screen time.

Principal photography started in November 1984. Marceau, 18 at the time of filming, had become a major star in French cinema thanks to her performance in La Boum (1980). However, her working relationship with Pialat proved notoriously fraught.

Marceau expected support from her co-star Gérard Depardieu, with whom she had had a good rapport on the film Fort Saganne, made the previous year. However, Depardieu's behavior on Pialat's shoot proved entirely different and he regularly bullied her, for example by making sure he had bad breath during their scenes together.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended