Le Fidèle
Michaël R Roskam (2017)
When I first saw that Matthias Schoenaerts was starring in something called Racer and the Jailbird, I assumed it was a further step down for him into vacuous ‘international’ cinema (though a step down from Red Sparrow may be a contradiction in terms). When I noticed that the director was Michaël R Roskam – the maker of Bullhead (2011), which gave Schoenaerts his breakthrough role – I thought again: besides, the French title of this new film (a Franco-Belgian co-production) is Le Fidèle, suggesting something more quietly serious. It turns out the English translation is just as close in spirit to the movie that Roskam has made. He doesn’t want to jettison the arthouse elements entirely but his crime-action drama is straining to succeed in the global marketplace. The first name on the screenplay is Thomas Bidegain (Noé Debré and Roskam are also credited). Bidegain co-wrote A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012) with Jacques Audiard but Racer and the Jailbird is an awkward concoction. It’s no surprise it’s gone down badly with critics and failed commercially too[1].
Schoenaerts is Gino (Gigi), a Brussels gangster with a cover story that he’s in the automotive import-export business. Adèle Exarchopoulos is Bénédicte (Bibi), who works for her father’s engineering firm and drives racing cars competitively. Roskam opens with a flashback to Gigi’s childhood, demonstrating the otherwise fearless boy’s terror of dogs (a phobia that’s seriously overworked in what follows). The narrative then switches to the present; briskly gets Gigi and Bibi, who are introduced through her brother (Thomas Coumans), into a relationship; and illustrates each of them doing their own thing. This makes for a regular supply of bedroom scenes; fast-moving cars, whizzing round a racing circuit or away from a crime scene; and bits of dialogue that are obviously significant because they’re so deliberately placed. Bibi asks Gigi if she can trust him and if he has any secrets. The answers are yes and ‘I’m a gangster – I rob banks’: Bibi laughs – he’s joking, of course. Her own secret, she tells him, is that she’s immortal and her dream destination is Buenos Aires. When Gigi, in an old-school moment, asks Bibi’s father Freddy (Eric De Staercke) for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Freddy says it’s a good idea – ‘You look the faithful sort’ (hence the French title) – but warns that Gigi has to ‘stop lying’ about the car import-expert business and ‘be a man’.
Although Bibi didn’t take Gigi seriously when he said was a professional criminal, she begins to suspect the truth after meeting some of his associates socially. Serge (Jean-Benoit Ugeux), Younes (Nabil Missoumi) and Gigi go back a long way, to juvenile detention centre. Bibi’s increasing realisation that Gigi may not have been joking is well done and a sequence in a bar, where the couple are drinking with Bibi’s pals and their girlfriends, is excellent. There’s enough going on between the characters and beneath the jokey conversation to raise hopes that Roskam may be looking to dramatise the men’s professional vs private lives à la Godfather. The hopes are short-lived. The story soon plummets into cliché, without appearing either to recognise it as such or to try to reinvigorate it. The leading man takes part in one last big heist before giving up crime for the leading woman he loves (and has now married). The heist goes disastrously wrong and Gigi, Serge et al end up in prison.
Once Gigi is behind bars, you wonder for a while why Roskam went to all that dynamic action-movie trouble in the first part of the film. This, at any rate, is exposed as box-office-minded padding to the story of star-crossed and devoted lovers. It’s hard to see that the predicament they now find themselves in would be any different if Gigi had been a smaller-time crook and Bibi never behind the wheel of a racing car. But Racer and the Jailbird then lurches into sustained and increasingly gruesome melodrama. Gigi and Bibi want a baby and secretly have sex during her prison visits but she can’t get pregnant and receives fertility treatments. On temporary release from jail, Gigi gets bitten by a (small) dog in a busy street, kicks the animal and, when the police are called, panics and goes on the run. Bibi hides him until she decides he’d better give himself up. Bang goes Gigi’s parole. Back inside, he keeps trying to escape, which seems a good way of delaying his release indefinitely.
It never rains but … medical tests reveal that Bibi has ovarian cancer. She engages some Albanian gangsters to get Gigi out of prison – but only if she dies. She dies. Gigi is informed of the plan to get him out of jail and arrange safe passage to Buenos Aires. He doesn’t want to go, telling the gangsters that Bibi didn’t understand he was hellbent not on escape, just on being with her. The gang leader Bezne (Kerem Can) tells Gigi he has no choice in the matter: the gang won’t get paid unless Gigi goes free. (I didn’t follow how this requirement was to be applied, now that Bibi was dead.) Bezne has Gigi savagely beaten up and sent, for his own safety, to a different prison. The breakout happens en route and there follows another flashily violent episode in the course of which the hero sort of conquers his cynophobia, though with a guard dog biting, among several other body parts, the Albanian hand that fed Gigi.
The closing sequence of Racer and the Jailbird is an extended, driver’s-eye-view car journey through a deserted Brussels at dawn. The last of Gigi’s getaways, this not only recalls earlier scenes photographed from a similar perspective (including Bibi’s on the racing track) but is also a reminder of Michaël R Roskam’s film-making talent, hidden from view for so much of this movie. Voiceovers repeating in Gigi’s mind the significant dialogue from the first half-hour detract only a little from this sequence, which wonderfully captures the headlong speed and sinuosity of the car’s progress through the streets and invests the cityscape with a grave beauty. The sense of uncontrolled forward impulsion is very strong but the car doesn’t crash. It stops outside a cemetery. The last we see of Gigi, he’s climbing over the high, locked gates of the place, presumably in search of Bibi’s grave.
The film leaves you asking questions albeit not searching ones. Even if Bibi doesn’t misunderstand Gigi’s motivation for trying to escape from prison, why does she think he’d want to end up in Buenos Aires without her? What becomes of her father and brother, both of whom seem important to Bibi, as she is to them, but who disappear without trace when she’s terminally ill? Why Le Fidèle rather than La Fidèle (or Les Fidèles)? Did Roskam think Matthias Schoenaerts’s talent and star status were enough to mend the split personality of Racer and the Jailbird and make it money? It’s somewhat understandable if Roskam did think this: Schoenaerts certainly moves between the action-man and human aspects of the story with remarkable ease. Adèle Exarchopoulos, so good in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), shows her quality again here but seems less comfortable than Schoenaerts on the commercial movie side of things. The film is well acted throughout – perhaps Kerem Can slightly overdoes the sinister-charismatic Bezne but, after all, he is playing someone from Albania. The negative racial stereotyping of which cinema is now so wary never seems to be avoided when it comes to Albanians.
18 July 2018
[1] At the time of writing, the film has a 30% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has recouped around $350k of a $9.6m budget.
