JACQUES AUDIARD revisited

[Chris Knipp]

SEE HOW HEY FALL/REGARDE LES HOMMES TOMBER (1994). See this Amazon customer review, because he points out the terrible quality of the DVD.He also describes the film well. Also see the Variety review by Lisa Nesselson. Audiard's debut isn't up to what was to come, except that it's weirder than the usual mediocre noir. It's got funny and it's got torture by electric shock. It's got a man who describes TV shows to a blind woman, and a guy who goes to the coma ward and reads the news and recounts his day to his comatose friend and plays a toy piano for him. In fact it's perhaps not a noir but the fable-like saga of a trio of losers, told in two time frames three years apart that come together. Based on a novel by Teri White called Triangle, it concerns Simon (Jean Yanne), a worn-out married calling card sale salesman who stakes out some crooks for his best friend, a cop. A shootout puts the friend in a coma. Simon goes looking for who did it. This leads him to Marx (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a petty thug and gambler with a bum leg and a cane, whom we observe several years earlier meeting on the road and adopting young nitwit and sometime Domino's Pizza employee Fréderic (Matthieu Kassovitz), whom he spurs to rename himself as Johnny. Johnny is too soft to be an enforcer for Donata, the gangster Marx works for, but dim and lacking in moral sense enough to carry out the hits Donata forces on Marx to repay his big gambling debts. Is Marx-Johnny a father-son relationship, or a gay one? Weirdly, Simon seems to be studying up to be homosexual. Are these fragments from the novel that have lost some of their meaning? A "dream" is pointless and so is a voiceover that comes in like, twice. Seen on a big screen some of the images (it was in the NYFF) would nice. It's been noted Trintignant is cast very out of his usual glamorous, tough-moody mode here, and that's fun, though maybe Yanne is better. But the real winner is Kassovitz, who was about to direct LA HAINE/HATE, which became famous. Kassovitz was awarded the 1995 Meilleur Espoir Masculin/Best Young Male Actor César award for his performance as Johnny. Maybe it was how Kassovitz turned out here that led Audiard to turn around right away and feature him in his 1995 film A SELF-MADE HERO/UN HÉRO TRÈS DISCRET. This first film shows us raw Audiard elements, the unclassifiable people and the mixture of genres - and the original writing: he had written screenplays for several years before directing SEE HOW THEY FALL.


MATTHIEU KASSOVITZ, JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT IN SEE HOW THEY FALL