Polar (1984)

Eugène Tarpon is a washed-up private eye. He has not had a case in months, and is severely in debt. But when he finally decides to pack it all up and return home to his small village of fifty inhabitants, a young woman, whose roommate has just been murdered, barges into his office past midnight begging for help. Tarpon rejects her, and tells her to call the cops, but his curiosity gets the better of him, and soon he finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue, romance, and murder. Polar is a quintessential neo-noir as only the French could make it; dark, brooding, bitterly funny, a little sexy, and full of more twists and turns than your average Slinky. The director, Jacques Bral paints Tarpon's world in muted colors; grays, browns, dark greens. Most of the film is shot in close-up and mid shots. These are mean streets, populated by caricatured gangsters with weird haircuts who always wear sunglasses, even while indoors. This is not the romantic Paris of Godard and Truffaut, but a grimy swamp of corruption and smog. On one level this is a sombre, sobering, and depressing film; it does not make one feel good about life, but it also darkly humorous and romantic in its own unique way. There are references to the noirs of the past, towards the end, a mysterious Maltese Falcon-esque object is introduced, the importance of which is never explained. The film ends with the line "To be continued...", but it never is continued. Bral breaks the fourth wall subtly and frequently; at one point, a clerk at a cheap motel is reading Polar, the novel the movie was freely adapted from. Beware of pretty women in the dead of night, but most definitely see this one.