Before the screening of L’Avocat French director Cédric Anger made it very clear that his inspiration came from the classic American organized crime thrillers. L’Avocat is about the young penal lawyer Leo, portrayed by Benoît Magimel (La Pianiste, Le Roi danse), rising fast in the world of criminal law by signing a deal with the devil, the mob boss Paul Vanoni and the price he eventually pays for that. The director’s fascination of these American films is seen in the very first shot of the movie.
The young penal lawyer Leo lies on a stretcher. He has just been shot and is being raced to the hospital. Not only the same beginning as Carlito’s Way, but also the exact same shot. A close-up from above, adding even voice-over of Leo contemplating where it all went wrong. After this first shot the story goes into flashback. Identical to the masterpiece by De Palma! This was only the first of, not references, but blatant copies of scenes or settings straight out of the much admired American mob movies that we have all seen numerous times.
After this opening, the story of the young lawyer going to the top is edited in the conventional American-style. Wipe-overs to cut to the next scene, and split screens like ones De Palma got famous for. Leo’s voice-over is used reminiscent the way Scorsese uses this narrative in Casino. In Scorsese’s film it is used explaining the audience how the mob controlled Vegas and skimmed the top of the profits the casino has made. In L’Avocat the voice-over is used in a similar way, explaining how the boss he has to defend operates in waste management (where have we seen that before?).
Yes, exactly, in The Sopranos. Director Anger even goes so far, as to steal an entire scene from the television series. Vanoni’s soldiers hijack a truck with the cooperation of the truck driver himself, who asks to be hit by one of them so he won’t be suspected from collaborating. Of course the soldiers can’t contain themselves and beat the guy to a pulp. Astonishing to see that literally everything that makes this scene work was copied from an episode of The Sopranos. It could have been a quote, a nod to David Chase. That is if the entire movie didn’t consist of these homages.
The problems Leo encounters are similar to the ones Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) has to deal with in Carlito’s Way. The lawyer who cannot resist the temptations a counselor of a mob boss is exposed to. Women, money and power. When the French feds close in on him, Anger tries to heighten the sense of suspense in a series of unconvincing scenes in which Leo pulls all sorts of stupid spy-stuff in the presence of hardened criminals. But of course, the lawyer turned James Bond, gets away with everything.
The film finishes with another imitation. Leo doesn’t actually say, “I am an average nobody…get to live the rest of my life like a schnook”, the way the Henry Hill-character does in Goodfellas, he just says the same thing using different words, like school kids do when plucking information of the Internet to write essays for homework.
Was I entertained? Yes, but the problem was that I was entertained by participating in a sort of film quiz, almost hitting an imaginary buzzer giving my answer to the question “From which movie was this scene?” I kept waiting for the scene in which Leo would wake up to discover a horse’s head in his bed. Maybe Anger didn’t see that one.
Rating: **
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