A slow-burn police drama that never fully ignites.
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French actor-director Xavier Beauvois latest feature stars Jérémie Renier as a small-town gendarme whose career takes an unwanted turn.
Most cop movies and most movies in general spend the first reel setting up a story that usually kicks off after an “inciting incident,” to quote various screenwriting manuals, which takes place within the first ten or 15 minutes. For the rest of the film, we then watch how that incident unravels and affects the lives of all those involved.
In Xavier Beauvois’ low-key police drama
Drift Away (
Alabtros), the veteran French writer-director does a curious thing: He spends about an hour on exposition, introducing us to a small-town gendarme named Laurent (Jérémie Renier) as he deals with different situations on the job, then returns to a stable home life with his long-term girlfriend Marie (Marie-Julie Maille) and daughter Poulette (Madeleine Beauvois).
film profile] (2005), it’s now the turn of the gendarmerie (aka soldiers) to provide the director with a storyline for a rural environment. Displaying a clear understanding of uncluttered narrative and subtle signs (which ultimately translates into a sophisticated simplicity), Beauvois uses this narrative thread to create a film which simultaneously explores the trajectory of a man of action and order who suddenly loses control, the inner circle of his loving family, the habits and customs of his professional community, a portrait of a seriously fractured French society, the distant ocean horizons and the prospects of an uncertain and perilous rebirth.
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