La Balance (1983)

Brilliant and touching

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Somewhat in the tradition of literary realism, this is a police story with much drama and a hint of tragedy. When the determined police officer Palouzi (Berry)decides to get the mob boss in his district by replacing a blown up informer, his choice is a hooker, Nicole (N. Baye) and her pimp, Dédé (P. Léotard). Both are rather humane, likable and loyal to each other. Perhaps a bit of a cliché in the character Nicole. Palouzi will put ruthless pressure on them to get their reluctant collaboration. Given this scenario, things will be necessarily difficult for them. Very good performances of Berry, Baye and Léotard, and some violence scenes well staged and played. Interesting denouement with somewhat ambiguous (to me) ending. The character of the efficient, driven and street-wise officer Palouzi has interest and psychological depth. Maybe he will be devious and tough to make Nicole and Dédé to play his game, but also maybe he will try to keep them out of harm's way, if possible. In sum, no clear-cut heroes and villains, good story and script, good actors, intense action, credible ambiance, with some interesting characters.

A longtime resident in France, Swaim (with an M) was an American. I didn't like this film which turned me off right at the beginning with its flashy but uninteresting opening sequence of whores and street people with loud music. Swaim had researched "special brigade" Paris police for months, supposedly putting his life in danger, yet he manages to make the main cops in the film look as slimy as the bad guys in Diva -- a dumb move. Somebody said Swaim was a follower of Friedkin rather than Melville/Mann. Others say he really didn't follow anybody. This would be a virtue only if he had his own style, but I can't detect much of one. There is as much of late Melville as there is of American TV cop shows. I don't like the bright lighting, which makes the Belleville scenes look like stage sets, even though they're authentic.That there is an illegal romance between a pimp (Philippe Léotard) and his stylish whore (Nathalie Baye) and they're both under pressure to be police informers as a result is a situation Melville could have made something good out of I'm sure, but Swaim just turns it all into brightly lit sleaze.A police sting operation that goes wrong and turns into a traffic jam and massacre of civilians is one more thing that makes the cops -- who seem worse than the hoods -- look bad, but it provides the film's only excitement. I also liked a brief interrogation in a pinball gallery before that: there should have been more interesting, intense use of locations like that. Many times the locations seem wasted and the physical business overblown and inefficient. Just consider what Melville does with a big dirty empty bedroom in the opening of Le Samourai! In the final shootout, cops keep exposing themselves to fire in an empty building. They don't seem to have watched enough Miami Vice episodes. It's a bit hard to see how this got the César for best film in 1982 when Catherine Deneuve was president of the jury. I guess it was a bad year.It's not that there haven't been any good French "polars noirs" since Jean-Pierre Melville or that there weren't any in the Eighties, because there have been and there were, but this just isn't one of them. It's competent but that ain't enough.Seen on a restored print in a Netflix-issued DVD.

What a nifty top of the B-film heap is this gritty Paris film, complete with love stories going bad, habits going strong, and cars going fast. Leotard has one of the great faces in the world and Nathalie Baye (in this outing new to me on release date) is just spectacularly vulnerable and perhaps a bit duplicitous. I would definitely make this part of my French film library. The film's co-director is from Evanston, Illinois! Bob Swaim has written films and directed them, mostly in France, and obviously learned his B-films on Saturdays with the rest of us and his France by living in it for a long time.

Watched this last night - a belting French Cops and Robbers drama set among the Paris version of the flying squad. It opens with their main informant being murdered and they need replacement to get Mr Big.They lean on a Dede (Philippe Léotard) a small time crook and pimp and his whore/girlfriend(Nathalie Baye) to persuade them to snitch on Messina.They use threats,beatings - in fact anything to get a result. The cops are played in a very unsympathetic light - the're really thugs who bend the law to suit their ends.Interestingly both Dede and Nicole are are much more attractive characters - he's her pimp but he loves her as she loves him. You really care about them as they are exploited by the cops who don't care what happens to them as long as they get their villian. There are car chases and shoot-outs aplenty but its the central relationship that lifts this above your average cop movie.All the leads are well played and you hope things will work out for Dede and Nicloe but you know life isn't like that.Not an obvious ending either and directed with an intesity by Bob Swaim who films it almost as a documentry so real is the gritty feel of the Parisian undwerworld.Highly reccomended.