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Strong and Moving!

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Reading reviews by a fellow IMDber in the run-up to Christmas,I found a review for a "ripped from the headlines" French Neo-Noir. Not having many X-Mas viewings planned,I was pleased to find the title in the handful of French flicks on Netflix UK,which led to me listening in on the informant.The plot-Gibraltar 1987:Fleecing his boss, Marc Duval leaves with his family and bags of cash for Gibraltar.Wanting to have a dream family life,Marc buys a boat and opens a café (both of which end up costing far more than the cash he stole.) Due to disagreements between the UK and Spain over who owns "the rock" Marc notices shady characters visiting his café,who appear to think that there is no risk of the underworld drug deals being broken. Tracking Marc down,French customs officer Redjani Belimane offers to help Marc pay his bills,in exchange for spying on his customers. Accepting the offer,Marc soon finds his life on the rocks.View on the film:Sailing to Gibraltar with the Duval's,director Julien Leclercq & cinematographer Thierry Pouget present a golden paradise of warm,sand colours layered on the café,and vast helicopter shots placing Gibraltar at the entrance of the underworld boarders. Taking the offer with the hope it will brighten his family life, Leclercq shakes Marc into a brittle Neo-Noir choke-hold,that drains the colours from Marc's life into dry dirt and low-hanging shadows closing down Marc's hopes in the café. Pushing Marc deeper into the Noir tar pit, Leclercq holds back from presenting the violence lavishly,to instead deliver it in short shocks which shakes Marc's Noir loner awareness over what he is now trapped in.Ripped from the headlines,the screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri makes his adaptation of Marc's own book a terrifying Noir tale,which is still unfolding (one of the gangsters who was up and running in '87 was finally arrested in Spain…in 2010!) Peeling open the "issues" Marc had with cash, Dafri puts the pieces of his Noir life down piece by piece, clattering with the fantastic dry atmosphere of underhanded deals being typed up by Marc and Belimane,being thrashed by the sobering anxiety of Marc having to prove to the underworld that he is one of them. Joined by a brilliantly shifty Tahar Rahim as Belimane, Gilles Lellouche gives an extraordinary gritty performance as Marc. Open and relaxed round the café, Lellouche knocks the wall down to a Noir dread which closes Marc off into a loner,with Lellouche pressing the law and the unlawful on his shoulders,as the informant becomes misinformed.

GIBRALTER is a wonderfully cynical French crime thriller, which sees Gilles Lellouche's stocky ex-con running a bar on the Rock in the 1980s which is making a loss. Thankfully Tahar Rahim's customs agent is there to take up the slack with cash for tips about the patrons of his bar. Gibralter is a smugglers paradise, positioned midway between Europe and North Africa. Of course the tips aren't enough and soon Lellouche is in over his head, as he ends up tangling with British law enforcement, Irish criminals and a drugs kingpin with an eye on his pretty sister. And can he really trust his cop buddies? Well, it's a French film, so no...The film is full of glorious images of stoic men protecting their gorgeous women, great Mediterranean seascapes and cynical cops engaged in bureaucratic infighting. If it all falls apart a bit at the end as everyone betrays everyone, with the climactic raid on a drugs ship lacking the dramatic intensity it needs, it doesn't matter too much because the ride to get there has been so good. Supposedly based on a true story, the film ends with a suitably dark Gallic betrayal.

Interesting film inspired from an actual event that occurred in the eighties. The tale of an ordinary man with major financial problems who is finally used, framed cheated by the french customs in order to jeopardize an international drug smuggling ring. Cheats, double cheats, all directional treachery, this film shows us the disgusting methods used by the french and British authorities - not so far from the ones used by the criminal organizations - to ironically wipe out those same organizations.Of course, that's an ordinary law abiding citizen who is here the stool pigeon. This film seems at first sight to be predictable, with a scheme already seen a thousand times before. It's sometimes hard to follow, the methods used by the customs to destroy the smugglers are too complex to be got on the moment, but this feature remains an authentic bitter story which lets you a bad taste in the mouth.No happy ending here, as you may expect from a Hollywood movie...Yes, a very interesting film.