Never believe appearances, or how you can fool the police

Rating: 9/10 (12 July 2008)

It is not a recent film, indeed. The Twin Towers are still standing. We are entering the profiling era and it was tempting for criminals to return the favor, though they have always done that. They here profile the police and their investigative methods. If you satisfy the police's way of thinking you will go through their net with no difficulty. You just have to convince the cop that a certain criminal does not exist, that this criminal projects you in some kind of legend or saga, is a bogeyman under the bed or in the closet. If the cops are convinced that this bogeyman is a pure collective invention, some folklore in another word, they will just shrug their shoulders and consider the one who is telling the story is, like all the others, haunted or possessed by a phantasm. And it works. He is the only survivor, or nearly, and he convinces them that his criminal persona is a myth. They are dubious, suspicious, skeptical and many other things, but they cannot imagine you are that myth, that criminal and that you are fooling them massively. To play on the impossibility for these cops to believe such a story can exist is your best diversion, disguise. They are ready to buy a lot but not that someone who is a coward, a weak person, a subservient non-entity, what's more a cripple, can be that ruthless, pitiless and unwavering mastermind of crime. Of course the punch line of the film is that the cop realizes he has been fooled because this cripple being the mastermind is the only explanation why he knows all he knows: he knows too much to just be an accidental witness. And the punch line is doubled with the composite picture of this fantasized criminal as seen by the other survivor who should not have survived and the criminal does not know he is still alive who has seen him very distinctly. This composite picture, a very sketchy image, is arriving on the fax machine as the cripple straightens up and gets into the car that was waiting for him outside the police station. Too late. This tactic has been used by other thrillers, but in this case it is very persuasive and the film works very well provided we do not profile the thriller-maker, otherwise we would know the end before the film ever starts.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines