Customer Reviews

Not For Or Against ( Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - France ]

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When a winsome young tv camerawoman becomes something like the adopted pet of a crew of charismatic Parisian criminals, she adopts a hard edge of her own.

Director Klapisch gives us a honeymoon period with the gang -- they even go on vacation together -- allowing us to understand the dynamics as the group reluctantly gets persuaded to pull off "the" big score. You know, the one where everyone gets to retire afterward.

Everybody who truly loves heist or crime films must feel the same sort of satisfaction in the inevitability of fate that the ancient Greeks enjoyed in their dramas. Our heroine even explains to us when she first joins the gang that she can clearly see two paths ahead of her -- "a road to good, and a road to evil. I decided evil was better."

I have enjoyed Klapisch's romances (Chacun cherche son chat) and dramedies (Un air de famille) in the past, and I liked this foray by the director into yet another genre he admires. You can see small tips of his hat to crime film masters throughout the film -- among them Jules Dassin (Rififi), Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai), and Michael Mann (Heat).

I can recommend that genre aficionados give themselves up to a leisurely arrival time of "the action," and that fans of L'Auberge espagnole not expect another cheery youth picture.

When a winsome young tv camerawoman becomes something like the adopted pet of a crew of charismatic Parisian criminals, she adopts a hard edge of her own.

Director Klapisch gives us a honeymoon period with the gang -- they even go on vacation together -- allowing us to understand the dynamics as the group reluctantly gets persuaded to pull off "the" big score. You know, the one where everyone gets to retire afterward.

Everybody who truly loves heist or crime films must feel the same sort of satisfaction in the inevitability of fate that the ancient Greeks enjoyed in their dramas. Our heroine even explains to us when she first joins the gang that she can clearly see two paths ahead of her -- "a road to good, and a road to evil. I decided evil was better."

I have enjoyed Klapisch's romances (Chacun cherche son chat) and dramedies (Un air de famille) in the past, and I liked this foray by the director into yet another genre he admires. You can see small tips of his hat to crime film masters -- among them Jules Dassin (Rififi), Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai), and Michael Mann (Heat) -- throughout the film.

I can recommend that genre aficionados give themselves up to a leisurely arrival time of "the action," and that fans of L'Auberge espagnole not expect another cheery youth picture.

Now available in region 1 dvd under the title Not for or Against.

Cedric Klapisch is one of those curious directors who clearly has a lot of talent but rarely makes particularly good films. Certainly Ni Pour, Ni Contre (Bien Au Contraire) is the kind of film it's easy to film to be ambivalent about - it's too well made to hate but at the end of the day too average to love. Marie Gillain is the bland, bored TV camerawoman who drifts into crime and discovers her bad side after being hired to record a robbery by Vincent Elbaz's crook (why we never find out). Finding a surrogate family with his second/third generation immigrant gang (Zinedine Soualem, Simon Abkarian and Dimitri Storoge) the first half of the film has a good time showing them living the good life with a couple of none-too-subtle nods to Goodfellas along the way, but the money runs out and as it does the inevitable big job to set them up for life beckons just as inevitably as it will all go wrong in the last reel. To be fair the film does a fairly decent job at deglamourising them and showing how small and frustrated their lives can be when they can't buy a slice of the high life, but the botched heist and its aftermath still feels as if it belongs to a different movie. It's not quite a crime does not pay moral, more that crime does pay if you're prepared to throw morality to the wind and be more ruthless than your friends, but that doesn't stop it all feeling too generic: the heist goes wrong and people die because that's what's expected to happen in this kind of movie. The performances are all good, the characters well drawn and Klapisch has an incredible eye for the scope frame that ensures some great visuals - the Carlton Hotel in Cannes has never looked so striking - yet it's never enough to hide the fact that behind the style and professionalism there's not a great deal of substance and nothing we haven't seen before many times. Not great, not bad, but on the other hand worth a look if you're in an undemanding mood.