| SNAKE EYES : Eric Barbier's 'The Serpent' [5/10] |
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| Monday, 08 October 2007 | |
 THE SERPENT : [5/10] : Le Serpent aka The Snake : Fr 06 : Eric BARBIER : 122 mins (BBFC) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Gateshead : 8th Oct : public show (£6.50) "When it comes to dealing with your actual ... hard man," wrote John Williams in Arena magazine, "no one does it better than the late, great Ted Lewis." Considering the enduring success of Mike Hodges' Get Carter (1971) - the first of three filmings of Lewis's 1969 Jack's Return Home - it's surprising that none of his other stories reached the big screen before. Plender (upon which Barbier and Tran-Minh Nam's screenplay for The Serpent is based) came out just before Get Carter - and while Carter isn't entirely unsympathetic, Plender goes far beyond even 'anti-hero' status. A thuggish ex-military private-eye specialising in blackmail and extortion, he's been borderline-psychotic ever since a traumatic childhood incident - and, following the death of his beloved mother, executes an elaborate revenge-plot against the school-friend he blames for his woes. In the film, the hapless target is successful fashion-photographer Vincent (Yvan Attal), negotiating the early stages of a messy divorce - but whose problems only really begin when his long-lost "pal" unexpectedly re-enters his life... We can presumably thank the recent runaway arthouse success of Guillaume Canet's Tell No One for The Serpent managing to obtain a UK release: both pictures, while watchable, are too long, too self-consciously "stylish" and ultimately too implausible to really warrant such exposure. But Barbier does have one trump-card at his disposal in the imposing form of Cornillac - who, at a youthful 40, is the likeliest heir to 49-year-old Aurelien Recoing as French cinema's badass du jour. 11.10.07 Neil Young  NB 1. all films seen in the UK, and all timings approximate, unless stated otherwise 2. timings taken from the BBFC website are rounded to the nearest minute (i.e. 100min 29sec = 100min, but 100min 30sec = 101min) 3. an asterisk [*] in the rating indicates that film is not a feature (i.e. 0-39m = short; 40m-63m = medium-length; 64m+ = feature)
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