Movies

‘Paris Countdown’ a pulpy debut

Edgar Marie’s pulpy debut begins in a sun-bleached desert outside Juarez, Mexico. Two friends — sour, whippet-thin Victor (Jacques Gamblin) and bearded, stocky Milan (Olivier Marchal) — are engaging in a drug deal that goes the way of all movie drug deals: badly. They’re caught, tortured by the police in grisly fashion and released when they roll over on the menacing Serki (Carlo Brandt). Jump to six years later, when Serki has managed to get out of Mexican stir and proceeds to stalk Victor and Milan all over their native Paris.

They flee through pristine parks and past historic churches — none of the scenery suggests that the City of Light is a place where a visit to a whorehouse is likely to end up in a blazing gun battle. “I love this [expletive] city,” remarks Milan at one point, and as he’s in a boat on the shimmering, moonlit Seine, it’s (maybe intentionally) the funniest line in the picture. Honey, who doesn’t?

The audience’s emotional investment in Victor and Milan’s relationship might have been higher had the two been ex-lovers, but they’re both carefully shown as family men with gorgeous wives. It’s a mildly interesting thriller — Paris through the eyes of a director who doesn’t know how to make its beauty menacing.