L'ELEGANT CRIMINEL
(American title: THE ELEGANT CRIMINAL)
A film review by Ken Johnson
Copyright 1992 Ken Johnson
135 min., not rated, Drama, 1991, In French with English subtitles Director: Francis Girod Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Jean Poiret, Jacques Weber, Francois Perier, Genevieve Casile, Jacques Duby, Jean Davy, Paul Le Person, Maiwenn Le Beso, Jacques Sereys, Rufus, Gerald Desarthe
In the 19th Century, notorious criminal Daniel Auteuil (who might have actually existed) gets caught and thrown in jail. The entire movie is a look by him back on his criminal life through the book that he is writing about his life.
L'ELEGANT CRIMINEL is going to be released on video cassette soon, so don't bother to go see this one in the theaters. I don't think that it is worth the money. The film is interesting to a point, so when it is released on video cassette, you might give it a look. On a scale of zero to five, I give L'ELEGANT CRIMINEL a three. L'ELEGANT CRIMINEL is unrated and contains explicit language, adult situations, and violence.
One of the problems with L'ELEGANT CRIMINEL is its length. Towards the end of the film, I found myself getting bored because of the length and the fact that it didn't have enough content to warrant being that long. In THE GODFATHER (and the sequels) there was enought material to keep the films interesting even though they were extremely long. This one runs short of material, so several scenes are stretched out longer than they should be. The story line is interesting, to a point. Some details about the man's life are left in that I felt were unnecessary and distracted from the rest of the film.
The acting in this film is very good and is one of the film's strong points. Auteuil does an excellent job. The supporting cast (I don't remember who played whom) was also great. The other strong point of the film is its elaborate sets. The sets are great and place the film very well. It looks like a lot of work went into building (or finding) the sets.
-------- Ken Johnson blj@mithrandir.cs.unh.edu
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