Alain Corneau is amongst the finest of the current writer-directors in France which makes it all the more surprising that he didn't attempt to tighten this script and erase some of the more obvious holes. Frank Poupart (Daeware) is a not very good door-to-door salesman peddling household goods from a suitcase so it is highly unlikely - make that impossible - that he would be able to produce a mohair dressing gown in Extra Large when an old lady asks for one. This is an important point because to a certain extent the rest of the movie hinges on it. Had he said he didn't carry such items, which would have been true, the old lady would not have invited him inside and he would not have met her niece (Trintignant) and slipped into the downward spiral that led to three murders. At a basic level it's the kind of situation - man meets femme fatale and it all ends in tears - that produced such classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, etc, but in each of those cases - a man is hired to work in a restaurant, meets the wife of the owner and starts an affair with her; insurance salesman calls at client's home to get him to renew a policy on the verge of expiring, meets the man's wife, starts an affair respectively the meetings were quite normal and not contrived as here. If you can get past that - plus the wife who goes from slut to Good Housekeeping Wife Of The Year overnight - then this is a fine, darkly comic, slightly surreal entry in which there are no winners. The mood is almost totally melancholic with gloom the predominant shade and Daeware weighs in with a remarkable performance and trivia buffs will enjoy learning that the actress who played his wife (and wound up dead) is the mother of Clovis Cornillac.
Review of Serie Noire
