Rivals

France. The Seventies. Leather jackets, big hair and bad moustaches.
Gabriel (François Cluzet), a seemingly rehabilitated convict, leaves prison armed only with the intention of never going back. However, a reunion with his estranged brother, François (Guillaume Canet), now a career-hungry police inspector, throws up a host of uncertainties. Gabriel does his best to settle into civilian life while François contends with the career he never expected. Cue Gabriel’s criminal past inevitably catching up with him, sending the brothers down their separate, yet parallel paths.  Fated to collide, they take up their opposing cudgels and commence their inevitable re-estrangement.

An absolute wealth of creativity and talent avoid metastasising the film with a sense of smugness or laziness. Instead, Jacques Mailot devoted eight years in the developing of the Papet brothers’ novel, his eye for detail and authenticity stretching far beyond simple mise-en-scene. Mailot manages to distil the luscious 70’s landscape all the while avoiding cliché and the now worn-out tenets of the gangster genre.
Helmed intelligently and thoughtfully, Maillot is blessed with the double whammy of Cluzet (Tell No One, Paris) and Canet (The Beach, Vidocq). Both revel in such polarized roles, embodying characters, much like Damon and DiCaprio did in Scorsese’s The Departed, who eschew moral code and leave us no clear choice as to who to root for. It is testament to the film’s quality that James Grey’s remake We Own the Night, just one year after Rivals’ release, was lauded both critically and commercially. If Shakespeare wrote film noir, this would be it.

James Ranson