Overrated

Absolutely brilliant

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Aware that I was getting close to giving my 2000th IMDb rating,I started planning on what the rated title would be.At first going for Henri-Georges Clouzot's La Vérité/The Truth,I was disappointed to find the official French DVD to have "broken English" Subtitles. When taking part recently in a poll for the best films of 1981, Garde a vue was at the very top of my "most wanted" list for the year. Telling a DVD seller this round the time I got the Clouzot,I was thrilled to hear that they had recently tracked down Garde,which has led to it getting my 2000th rating.The plot:Missing out on New Years Eve celebrations, Inspector Antoine Gallien and Inspector Marcel Belmont sit in an interrogation room interviewing attorney Emile Martinaud. With Martinaud (who was on his own each time) having reported to the police two young girls he found raped and murdered, Gallien and Belmont put Martinaud under as being the likely killer. Interviewing him for hours, Belmont and Gallien are unable to any substantial evidence from Martinaud,which leads to Gallien interviewing Martinaud's wife Chantal,and learning of the hidden corridors in Martinaud's life.View on the film:Making her penultimate film,Romy Schneider gives a haunting performance as Chantal which reflects the deep troubles Schneider was having in her life,from the interview Chantal has with Gallien being given a washed out mood by Schneider, in expressing the breakdown of the Martinaud's marriage. Left to do the typing in the interrogation, Guy Marchand gives a cracking performance as Belmont, whose frustrations Marchand makes crackle on screen,as Belmont sees the "murderer" in front of him,but unable to lay a finger on him.Stamping round the interrogation room, Lino Ventura gives a magnificent performance as Gallien,who is given a calculating tact by Ventura,which shatters from Gallien's passion to bring justice to the murdered girls. Caught in the hard line the cops take, Michel Serrault digs Martinaud's heels in with an upper-crust self belief,which crumbles as the interrogation unveil the Neo-Noir loss at wits end behind Martinaud businessman façade.Joined by his wife Annie playing a major role in the flashback scenes, co-writer/(with Jean Herman and Michel Audiard) director Claude Miller & cinematographer Bruno Nuytten sit in on the interrogation with a stylish,pristine appearance wiping any brightness away for dour,white and grey Noir colours. Keeping all the guys in one room, Miller fires up the claustrophobic anxiety with tightly coiled whip-pans across the confined location,which sweep into hard-nosed close-ups lingering on each vicious exchange.Taking John Wainwright's book into the station,the writers superbly intercut flashbacks to the murder scenes and Martinaud's private life to emphasise the importance of what Gallien and Belmont attempt to uncover. Taking place against a "stage" setting, the writers keep the Neo- Noir atmosphere fresh with incredibly subtle changes in the dialogue,from everyone trying to get under the skin of each other,to Gallien, Martinaud and Belmont spitting out their frustrations,of all being under suspicion.

Garde à Vue is a sound police procedural & Lino Ventura, whether cop or criminal, is always reliable. His Inspecteur Gallien was every bit as good as I'd expected & Michel Serreault was quite adept as the suspect Martinaud too. Romy Schneider as his wife, however, seemed stiff & wooden — tho that could have been intentional.That said, Gallien was the only one whose behavior seemed at all realistic. All other human interactions — including those of the other cop, Belmont — seem peculiar if not bizarre. Even Martinaud, tho well acted, seems forced & not quite lifelike.The plot-line leads nowhere & parachuting in the real killer for a surprise ending like that strikes me as cheesy. What kind of moron reports his car stolen, knowing he'd left a murdered child's corpse in his trunk? I can't recall Schneider's reasons for living down the hall rather than getting a divorce, but her suicide struck me as more bathetic than dramatic.I know, I know, criminals can be exceedingly stupid, many cases end up being solved by sheer fluke & people do inexplicable things. Gallien aside tho, everything these people do or say strikes me as surreal. Maybe it's supposed to? I dunno. I know this film is considered a classic; I just wish I could say I enjoyed it.

What keeps us going - or at least what I feel the writer wanted us to keep us glued at an early point is our desire to know whether Martinaud has done the dirty deed. Without spoiling so much, of course there is a red herring and a twist. But then we discover that this is the story of Martinaud's imperfections and his difficulty in coping. When there is the revelation - we begin to sympathize and pity him because as the story progresses we are made to think he is the sick, perverted pedophiliac that we're predisposed to have in mind. One of those things he has to cope with is the distant gap he and his wife have even though they live on the same roof. These problems of course are given their denouement in the film's shocking finale.This movie demands your patience and it has certainly tried those of restless teenagers sitting at the rear. They were heckling obviously because they aren't partial to "central location" films. Although there is a bit of travelling, when we get to the woods and the beach. And we realize that Gallien isn't as clever as we are made to think he is.The Inquisitor is Grade A-

Nothing revolutionary here; just impeccably elegant, restrained cinema.GARDE A VUE is confined almost exclusively to a drab police station, and mostly to one interrogation room, but director Claude Miller (who made the wonderful film THIS SWEET SICKNESS, among others) intercalates spare glimpses of exterior tableaux as minimalist locale scenography. Miller's restraint, especially early on, is breathtaking, and his exquisite handling of the consequently-pivotal interior mise-en-scene makes for captivating viewing.Lino Ventura is superb as usual, succeeding to legitimize a character that, on paper, is cliche: the laconic, hard-nosed, world-weary homicide detective. Ventura lives the role, making it completely believable, even though the script allows us little access to his inner workings; the film ends at the very moment it appears he will be forced to confront his failure for the first time.Michel Serrault is equal to the task as the suspected child-killer who shrewdly spars with the single-minded flic. The exchanges between the two are more-often-than-not pregnant with tension and the aura of a constantly metamorphosing playing field for a battle of wits. Serrault's character is by turns deplorably haughty and cunning, and pitiable; then later....The "message" of GARDE A VUE, if one were to search for one, is a condemnation of police methodology and the kind of pressures that make a cop over-zealous to, if necessary, close cases at the expense of justice. For most of its length though the film shines as nothing more than an exemplar of how to turn a potentially soporific set-bound scenario into a suspenseful drama of the utmost cinematic economy.