Starring: Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume Canet, Ines Sastre
Director: Pitof
Category: III
Debut director Pitof brings an impressive pedigree to Vidocq. He was behind the scenes - as visual effects supervisor - for some of the most stunning French films of the 1990s, most noticeably Delicatessen (1991) and City Of Lost Children (1995). The work, under director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, owed a lot to the digital cameras the pair employed which created a style all of its own - all deep, lush colours and cartoon-like characters.
And while Pitof has now branched out on his own, Vidocq is very much still in the Jeunet mould. This is an 'unreal' world set in 19th-century France and it traces the fictionalised exploits of the legendary French detective Vidocq (Gerard Depardieu). We begin with Vidocq chasing down a masked man - 'The Alchemist', we are later told. They fight and the detective eventually falls into a fiery furnace.
Picking up the tale then is a young writer, Etienne (Guillaume Canet). He's been hired to write Vidocq's biography and is drawn into the search for clues as to just who the masked man was, and what Vidocq had found out about him. So Etienne enters the seedy Paris underworld, a place full of prostitutes, drug addicts and villains. A place where nothing is ever really as it seems.