Black River: Vincent Cassel masterful [Critique]

Zonca signs a chaotic but exciting film, dominated by the bigger than life composition of Vincent Cassel.

Released in July 2018, Black River had divided the critics. You can make up your own mind by watching it this Monday evening on France 3.

Could it be the passage of fifty? After Gauguin – Voyage to Tahiti and before The world is yourstwo films in which he assumes his age by exaggerating the (tired) line, the flamboyant Vincent Cassel is unrecognizable in this thriller by the revenant Erick Zonca: slightly hunchbacked, with greasy hair, a dirty beard, and puffy eyes, he plays an alcoholic and dirty police commander (François Visconti, what a name!) next to whom Olivier Marchal's depressive antiheroes would almost seem like angels. Cassel eats up the screen, even if it means becoming the main object and relegating the rest to the background. This is the singularity, assumed, of an unfriendly film in which everyone pulls a face and wears a more or less opaque mask: that of the suffering mother for Kiberlain (she reported her son missing, which Visconti is going to investigate) and that of the invasive neighbor for Romain Duris (the missing man's former private tutor).

Ambiguous as desired

Like Marchal, but less caricatured, Zonca favors character-based stories to the detriment of the somewhat floating plot – some narrative leads like Visconti's son's plunge into drug trafficking are not resolved. The risk of dropping out is great but the increasingly complex relationship between Cassel and Kiberlain feeds a growing fascination for this rickety thriller whose rather dizzying denouement comes at just the right time to reward the assiduous viewer.

Vincent Cassel – The Emperor of Paris: “I felt like I was doing a period Mesrine”