Serie Noire

This clever 1979 French adaptation of low-life crime novelist Jim Thompson manages to take the essence of Thompson’s all-American cesspit perversity and perfectly adapt it to a French sensibility. Set in the suburban slums outside Paris, Siere Noire evokes urban cityscapes whose corrosive atmosphere perfectly mirrors the gradual demoralization of the protagonist: second-rate door-to-door salesman Franck Poupart (Patrick Dewaere, resembling a sort of poor man’s James Spader). Poupart spends his days shuffling from one squalid dwelling to another selling assorted merchandise to reluctant potential customers. When Poupart’s not peddling crummy homeware, he’s either abusing his depressive wife or being busted for embezzling funds from his supplier. And just to round out the Thompsonesque tropes, a teenage prostitute is thrown in the mix (Mona, played by the late Marie Trintignant). Mona’s elderly aunt is a rich miser and one of Franck’s regular customers. Meanwhile, Mona has a dangerous crush on Franck, who does his best to avoid contact with her for the obvious reason of illegality. But Franck warms to Mona once they decide to concoct a screwy plot to murder her aunt and make it look like the reviled neighborhood idiot, Tikides (Andreas Katsulas), did the deed. From here, the film is carried by the explosive acting of Dewaere, as he slowly, and very believably, morphs into a cold-blood killer before our eyes. As per Thompson, of course, the women are all passive characters and only come alive when trying to thwart whatever scummy ambitions the men in the story have ('Tarts like that just piss you off all day long,' says Franck, in a typical misogynist quip). But on the whole, Serie Noire is tonally and visually brilliant, and it’s a sublimely bleak, criminal-class perspective on the Parisian experience that French film would hardly approach again until the urban gut-punch of La Haine in the mid-1990s. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)