The Connection

The French Connection retold from the French perspective, Cédric Jimenez’s crime the thriller (known as La French on the director’s home soil) is less like the Friedkin and Frankenheimer seventies thrillers and more like the recent Mesrine, with a little of early Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann thrown in for good measure. The Connection may have those ambitions but it falls short in trying to do too much.

Marseille, 1975, and the drug-running crime organisation known as The French is flooding heroin to New York and beyond. Headed up by Gaetan ‘Tany’ Zampa (Lellouche), the gang go about their business unchecked with an ineffectual and corrupt police force unable/unwilling to stop them. Enter magistrate Pierre Michel (Dujardin), mirroring Kevin Costner in The Untouchables: initially thought too soft by his colleagues, he grows into the role by resorting to less than legal means...

The Connection draws on the strengths of Mesrine - the beautifully realised time period detail, the banality of the violence, the uber slickness of it all - but also its weaknesses. In covering so much ground, in taking the story through so many years, Jimenez never truly gets under the fingernails of the characters. There are welcome attempts to portray Zampa not as the typical callous gangster (he’s faithful to his wife, he reads to his son - one scene has him break down in his wife’s arms) but unfortunately Jimenez can’t extend the same surprises on the other side, as the Wife Character (Sallette) is there only there to do the clichéd thing: "It’s either your family or your job!" Yawn to that.

There are two stories here – the detective’s and the gangster’s – and in opting to tell as much as he can about both Jimenez never really pulls off that Heat double-header; Mann’s coffee shop tete-a-tete is replicated here on a sunny clifftop with much less the effect. With so much material to wade through Jimenez is forced to rely on Scorsese-like music montages to push the story on.

But it is snazzy to look at. With its cool cars and slick shirts and cigarettes and shades and sunshine, The Connection oozes sex appeal. Oddly it has a laidback atmosphere despite the genre and Dujardin is a charismatic leading man. Those Scorsese montages might be overused but they are stylish as hell and the soundtrack provides an eclectic mix with Velvet Underground next to Blondie, Townes Van Sandt, and Kim Wilde.