Posted in: Movies, Recent Updates | Tagged:

Look! It Moves! Cherchez Les Flics by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 18 Jun 2012 09:42:52 -0500

Last updated Mon, 18 Jun 2012 11:27:19 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes foe Bleeding Cool;

Finally caught up with BRAQUO (apparently French urban slang for "violent heist), a French cop series that makes THE SHIELD look like DOWNTON ABBEY.

BRAQUO starts with a cop putting a pen through the eye of a suspected rapist and doesn't get any happier from there. For the rest of the hour, a couple of cops from the same squad take compromising photos of a lawyer at a dominatrix' den to blackmail him with, the cop in the first scene shoots himself and, well, again, things still do not get better. In fact, things get worse as the first series progresses.

BRAQUO is about a squad of cops in hell. Nobody is an angel in this urban wasteland they operate in. A corrupt and indifferent command and internal affairs are on their backs and they resort to breaking the rules to solve their cases, even resorting to murder and armed robbery, completely blurring the lines between them and the violent perps they're after, especially when they're not above skimming from the take or snorting drugs themselves.

BRAQUO was adapted from a novel by David Defendi, scripted and directed by Olivier Marchal (who also co-wrote the original novel), an ex-cop turned actor, screenwriter and director, who apparently brings his own experiences to inform his work. Much of the template of BRAQUO can be traced to his 2004 movie 36 QUAI DES ORFEVRES (released in DVD in the US as 36TH PRECINCT), which starred Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Autueil as two rival senior cops who hate each other so much that they actively plot to destroy each other. The most pungent thing about Marchal's portrayal of cops in his movie and new series is that they're really another gang, albeit with badges and official sanction. The second half of the first series was directed by Fredric Schoendoerffer, who also has form with violent crime noirs like PARIS TAKEDOWN (French title: TRUANDS, known in other countries as CRIME INSIDERS). Marchal and Schoendoerffer are filmmakers in the cop noir tradition who seem to be pushing the genre even further into unflinching violence and brutality, more than anyone had before.

What BRAQUO reminded me of most of all is that out of all countries, France is the one whose films, TV and popular culture unflinchingly assumes the police are horrible fucking bastards. French movies have a long tradition going all the way back to the late Sixties or early Seventies of assuming the cops are bastards. Even light comedies with nice cop heroes make that assumption while having their heroes being considered unusual for not being a bastard. You can see this even in the recent TAXI movies, a light comedy thriller franchise produced by Luc Besson about a cop who joins forces with a French-Arabic cab driver who's the best driver in all of Paris. Back in the 80s, when Thames Television was still around, they used to show English dubbed French thrillers and cop movies late on Thursday nights, many of them starring Alain Delon and many others not that depicted cops as utter bastards as they casually bent the rules and brutalised suspects and grasses alike. I barely remember their titles or plots anymore, but that was what I remember about them.

Most countries, especially Britain and the US, have a sentimental attitude towards cops in their pop culture. They're guardians, avengers, saviours, upholding the status quo, all this in spite of increasing news reports of corruption, racism and brutality committed by cops. Britain especially likes to cling to the fantasy of flawed-but-sympathetic guardians bringing order to chaos in fiction and TV. The recent Danish cop shows THE KILLING and THE BRIDGE were hits on British TV for that reason, yet darker French shows like THE SPIRAL (ENGRENAGES) and BRAQUO have enjoyed some success in Britain as well, as have US shows like THE WIRE and THE SHIELD.

French pop culture is as sentimental about cops as everyone else, but interestingly, they show them as bigger bastards than any other country's fiction dares.

Unlike any of those shows, BRAQUO does not offer any real comforting or soft moments to make you feel better about the characters. They have to stay loyal to each other or go down together, but what they get up to isn't always that different from what bad guys get up to, except the bad guys are far worse than they are, and the show seems to be daring you to keep watching. Where SPIRAL is about the subtle, tangled relations between the law courts and the cops as they deal with crime, which draws comparisons with THE WIRE, BRAQUO is all blunt hammer-blows of noir brutality, blackmail, corruption, brute violence, stale booze, sleazy sex, cigarette smoke and gunfire.

So why we do like watching noir so much? It's definitely a guy thing, in the way that women like romances, this is romance for us, and the darker, the nastier the noir, the better. It's like an endurance test for us. It's why Garth Ennis' war comics and Ed Brubaker's noir comics do so well. What Olivier Marchal has done with BRAQUO is boil down the cop noir genre to its barest essentials so it has virtually no fat at all in the narrative, focusing on the sheer awfulness of the world and what the cop characters get up to, leaping from one bad deed to the next as they dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole from which there may not be any way back up, the ultimate cop existential hell. It's very French.

BRAQUO series 1 and 2 are available on DVD with English subtitles from the UK, and I ordered it on Amazon.

Watching the detectives at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!