I cannot sympathize with that man

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2008)

This film takes a great pleasure in depicting a mediocre criminal, a drug dealer actually, who considers himself a hero, a genius and maybe even a god on earth. His initial success he analyzes as his own and does not see it is the success of a system and when he fails it's because he crossed a line somewhere: too much and too sure of himself maybe even arrogant and condescending. Then his story is a story of successive failures in between short periods of success and long periods of prison as a result of it all. He ends up betrayed by his own partners who deliver him to the FBI and DEA one night in order to get themselves out of the business clean and unharmed. Finks, that's what his friends were. But he deserved it. Then the story seems to support him on the other side of the coin: his daughter. He loses his wife and his daughter in order to go and by going to prison a first time. Then he re-conquers his daughter little by little and he promises to take her away from the squalor her mother is providing. But that's when he decides to do one more trick to get the money he needs to kidnap his own daughter. That's when he is picked up, lower than him you cannot fall, by the police and sent to prison for so long that he will never see his father alive again. So he dreams his daughter comes and visits him. But that's a dream, an illusion, a mirage. He was not able to deliver his promise and he has been discarded like an old shoe or a worn out sock. Sad but after all very moralistic. Crime does not pay and only brings deception, disappointment and suffering. Too moral maybe to be as good as it could have been. How can we support or sympathize with this selfish and arrogant p**** of a man? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines