36 Quai des Orfèvres: billed by many as 'a Gallic Heat'. Photograph: The Kobal Collection
There are many things the French do well, and film-making is one of them. Rightly or wrongly, the French consider cinema their invention, and look with haughty condescension on anyone who tries to tinker with their toy. Hence François Truffaut's notorious line that there was "a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'."
This is patently untrue - and by way of irrefutable evidence, it's enough to cite the following: Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell, Terence Davies. (Also, let's be honest: most of Truffaut's own films are dreadful.) But it's difficult to deny that, considered per capita, the French make more good movies, more often, than their cousins across the Channel. Having just spent a few days at the Fantasy FilmFest in Berlin, dedicated to genre cinema in all its forms, I'm forced to conclude that, when it comes to gritty, big-screen police dramas, the French currently have pretty much everyone in Europe beat.
I've just watched three excellent examples of le cinéma policier français, all made in the past 18 months. Counter Investigation by Franck Mancuso is a tale of a policeman seeking to avenge the rape and murder of his own nine-year-old daughter. Truands, by Frédéric Schoendoerffer, is a raw-knuckled illustration of the homily "no honour among thieves", accompanied by some of the most graphic violence in recent commercial cinema. And Le Serpent, is a stomach-churning thriller about a man setting out to destroy the life of his nemesis.
Coming out, I struggled to recall a recent British crime flick that has displayed such breezy self-assurance. (Superb though it is, Hot Fuzz's status as a parody renders it an exception.) Unvarnished British realism is alive and kicking - Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen will be remembered as one of his finest works, while recent debuts like London to Brighton, Red Road and Dead Man's Cards all announced the arrival of major new talents - yet British films seem for some reason to have trouble marrying the truthful accounts at which they excel, to the stricter narrative templates of genre film-making.
In France, this current renaissance began in 2004, with 36 Quai des Orfèvres, billed by many as "a Gallic Heat": a stylish, ruthless battle-of-wits between two Paris cops, one corrupt (Gérard Depardieu), the other betrayed (Daniel Auteuil). But in fact the origins go further back: who could have predicted that, last year, the most commercially popular and critically-acclaimed foreign film to play in New York would be over 30 years old? Yet there is was: Le Cercle Rouge, by the great, perennially-underrated Jean-Pierre Melville.
Though badly belated, this acclaim also seems appropriate, since whenever French writers and directors elect to work in the genre of crime fiction, they've usually gazed across the Atlantic for inspiration. Though largely set in Bordeaux, Counter Investigation is actually adapted from an American source: a short story (Like a Bone in the Throat) by US crime doyen Lawrence Block. Likewise, Tell No One is adapted from a bestseller by Harlan Coben, and The Beat My Heart Skipped was a transposition of James Toback's Manhattan-set original. Even Truffaut adapted US pulp hero David Goodis' Shoot the Pianist for one of his better films.
The French are smart enough to know that their contemporary fiction is mostly worthless, and their crime-fiction tradition virtually extinct. And though Britain has a pulp-fiction tradition too, from Eric Ambler, Ted Lewis through to present-day practitioners like Jake Arnott and Ian Rankin, for some reason it doesn't translate to the big-screen; in the UK, TV dramas like Prime Suspect have usurped the place of the cinematic crime flick.
Perhaps it's time either to start raiding the remainder bins, or else give up on local stories and authors altogether, and look instead to borrow from our friends across the pond. That "special relationship" must be good for something ...
