à droite : l'épouvantable Simon Abkarian : Al Barad
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terror thriller a la americaine
Author: dromasca from Herzlya, Israel
6 February 2014
What is bluntly visible in this French film is the American look. Actually it is not only the look - the whole approach taken by the film starting with its story and I dare say with its ideology, going through the rapid pace and crisp editing style and ending with the style of acting is borrowed from the American 'war on terror' movies. We even have some kind of a French equivalent of the CIA headquarters in this film. The most amazing things is however that the combination works. Philippe Haim is a talented director and his 'Secret Defense' is a good American thriller even if it is acted in French.
Recruiting a young and sexy woman who finds herself in some kind of distress and turning her into a spy is a theme that we have already met in the classical Nikita, and original French film turned into an American movie and than successful TV series. The world of Secret Defense is however today's France and Middle East, and a parallel thread develops the background of an abused criminal who falls of dark side of the war on terror. The paths of the two characters are to meet inexorably, and we know it from almost from the beginning. The smart and unfortunately true idea of the script is that both the good girl and the bad guy are victims, paws, foot soldiers in war machines that confront each other and eventually crush everybody who falls under their wheels.
The story has logic and the development of the main character played by Vahina Giocante is credible and does not lack an unexpected dose of sensitivity.There is one moment only when the accumulation of coincidences seemed to me to be hard to believe, but otherwise the story line and the excellent acting, the exact rendering of the various environments and the pace of action built upon interleaved threads contribute all to the good quality of a film that has an American look, and this time I am writing this appreciation on its positive meaning.
Author: pigsinspace from Germany
30 September 2009
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
The filmmaker Philippe Haim obviously likes Ridley and Tony Scott and with Secret Defense he delivers a nice try. The problem: he keeps too much to the surface.
Secret Defense has the pace of a Tony Scott production but lacks the depth of character of other movies in the genre like f.e. Syriana. Recruiting a prostitute/student and turning her into a top agent in a matter of (movie) minutes takes some skills. Vahina Giocante sure is pretty (and she was perfect in Lila Dit Ca) but she never gets the chance to deliver a convincing personality (nor do most of the other actors). Half an hour more would have helped the story a lot. The question of course remains: would Haim have been able to fill it accordingly?
But its not just that.The story is too flat, has too many clichés chasing each other and most characters are mainly one dimensional.Which doesn't mean Secret Defense doesn't deliver. If you like your spy stories to be more like action movies you're in for a treat. A touch of Bourne and Bruce Willis, a bomb here, a sexy agent there. Not bad at all. Just nothing like the real thing.
This is a very bleak and very well acted movie. It's about the war on terror, but has quite a few other elements to it. You will have more "fun" with the movie, if you read as little as possible about the story of the movie.
Just be aware that the movie is a thriller and has a woman as a central character. It's morally moving on a thin ground, but this is what makes this movie really great. It kept me on my toes guessing, what will happen next. The performances are great and even if you dislike some characters, they are still very engaging and the movie might have some points, you might over think your views.
It makes a difference to see it from the French point of view. After all, ten percent of the population of France are now refugees or descendants of refugees from Muslim North Africa. This film is about the French Secret Service, which has initials I can never remember, but you know the one. It portrays them as hyper-efficient, hyper-modern, ruthless and dedicated professionals who will, as Gérard Lanvin the lead actor puts it in the film, be 'patriots' who will 'do anything for my country'.
And 'anything' really means, unfortunately, 'anything'. The film portrays in grim, horrifying, and fascinating detail the fantastic entrapments devised to recruit young agents in the fight against Muslim terrorism. The French call the Qaeda fanatics by their alternative name of 'Salafis' rather than 'Wahabbis'. The terrorists are portrayed in 'Damascus' and 'Afghanistan' (both actually filmed in Morocco) with extreme and convincing realism. The film is disturbing in many places, with one homosexual rape scene and several murders.
I believe the horrifying footage of the dog in the glass cage who is killed by cyanide gas is a real Qaeda video. The set-ups carried out by the French secret service are so devious that they would make Machiavelli blush. The film does not have the Hollywood approach to violence, which always focuses on childish and adolescent fantasies of things crashing and exploding. Instead, the French, who are a far more sophisticated people, concentrate on what happens to people rather than the havoc wreaked to mere objects.
In this, they are more straightforward. If a severed head has to be delivered in a cake box, it is delivered in a mundane ordinary manner, and it does not have to be delivered by a helicopter smashing into a skyscraper. Anyway, there are few skyscrapers in Paris, thank God. (Skyscrapers have no business existing anywhere other than New York and Shanghai.) The attitude towards the agent ('humint' to the Americans) is brazenly unfeeling. As Lanvin says: 'An agent is not a person, he is a tool.' Controllers are not allowed to treat their agents as human beings.
The film features an astonishingly versatile performance by the young actress Vahina Giocante, who is tricked into becoming an agent, and who screams at Lanvin when she realizes what he has done to her that he is 'all alone'. He answers with resignation: 'Yes, I know.' The whole story is very bleak, that is, when it stops its restless pace of action long enough to allow anyone a moment to reflect. The film is really a most impressive achievement, exciting, well made, relentlessly entertaining, if you have the stomach for the grisly bits. The director, Philippe Haïm, who also wrote the story, appears from his name to be of North African descent, so perhaps he has a special feel for all of this. He has done a superb job of making a French 'blockbuster'
At last a GOOD French Film!! :) First, to introduce my opinion and place it in perspective, I must say that for more than two decades, I've been watching almost everything released both in the US and in Europe and the best of Asia, South America and the rest of the world. And among all topics, realistic spy/intelligence Films/Mini-Series/TV series has been in my favorites for half a decade.
Thus I am a big fan of this genre and one can honestly say that my culture about it as well as about movies in general is quite large. My favorites lately being by far BBC's MI5:Spooks, I've watched all 7 seasons of it (about 100 episodes). Or for example, I'd also recommend The Company (Miniseries) or DeNiro's The Shepherd. Being French, I also watch a lot of our films and I must sadly admit that it is most often a boring torture, especially lately. But not today with Secret Defense. And I can at last happily share and say that SECRET DEFENSE is probably in the BEST entertaining spy French Films released for a long time.
I also rarely write reviews.Only mostly to praise and recommend a good film that might need attention or to sack the worst pretentious ones that attract crowds of sheep despite having been a torture to watch for me Why is SECRET DEFENSE so worthy of our attention? First, the storyline is properly well written, simple and plausible rather than far fetched to exaggerated improbabilities for the sole objective of cinematic roller coasting attempts too often seen in this genre. That makes it more believable and interesting.
The counseling from renowned French and Oriental experts on this topic was wise, mostly followed and thus effective. There are not that many features on our former DGSE and I praise the production for not going in the James Bond direction but more in the MI5 one. Although one true fan might ask when are we at last gonna see and show how intelligence work can mostly be truly boring or spooky and inhumane? But we're getting in that direction here, right from the beginning when Lanvin introduces himself in saying that an agent must be seen as a weapon only and never as a human.
The final editing is properly paced with no unnecessary elements making the movie properly entertaining and interesting.Then, the visual directing is OK+ with some cinematographic effects worthy of a big screen release. That is becoming rare.The excellent beginning credits are Oscar worthy!!Then the actors directions is not questionable. Gérard Lanvin (lead actor) is perfect as always. Second & third characters are never playing out of tune. That is remarkable in France where even lead actors can sometimes, way too often, be left directed out of tune in the final editing. That is a torture to my hear as much as a bad singer. And I'm not even mentioning second characters that often sound worst than imaginable, worst that the worst liar. Not here.
Vahina Giocante (lead actress) is also very well directed and surprising when she (quite often) manages to make us forget her exquisite beauty and discover her effective tormented face full of emotions that then becomes not only pretty but efficiently emotive, in the Charlize Theron direction. And like Charlize, she has the highly saluted courage of not fearing to not pass over the best primal parts of her, her very beautiful body in the nude and bare butt. And that makes sense to show them since the story uses her beauty as a "weapon, that only is an agent" (dixit Lanvin). A bit too rarely here but more could indeed unfortunately have affected the nature of her performance in the movie. Thanks Vahina.
Overall, All this makes SECRET DEFENSE a very honorable or good French Film, one of its best made in the last decade in the entertaining with a substance spy action genre. So watch it and prove otherwise if you don't agree.
An excellent french espionage yarn
Author: GUENOT PHILIPPE (philippe.guenot@dbmail.com) from France
15 December 2008
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
That's the most wonderful and convincing film ever made about french Intelligence Services - DGSE - the equivalent of the CIA, MI 6 or MOSSAD. A rough, sharp, accurate and awful programmer which tells the story of ordinary people who are manipulated by their own "managers" in order to become decoy themselves. Before being wasted, in the name of the National Security.It made me puke. But so realistic.
Lanvin is terrific as a cold blooded, ruthless supervisor who doesn't hesitate to sacrifice his own recruits, the rookies. As his character says in the movie:"Agents are not human beings but weapons..No comment.Simon Abkarian is also delightful (delightful !?Mmmm ce n'est pas le premier adjectif qui me vient à l'esprit)as a machiavellian terrorist. In this film, many things are revealed about Intellingence horrible proceedings, as well as terrorists networks.It's the first movie made about that subject since Frederic Schoenderffer's AGENTS SECRETS, in 2004.
