Chrysalis

A French (did I mention it's French) noir flic half-heartedly disguised as sci-fi, Chrysalis had many enjoyable elements, but ultimately failed to create enough of a connection with its characters to build much in the way of care, anxiety and catharsis through its (noir-esque) roller-coaster plot.

On the style - substance spectrum, this film, which was made by French people, was heavily skewed towards (you guessed it) style. One suspects that the director (first timer Julien Leclercq) set it in the future so that he could show some cool sleek police uniforms, and excellent designer fridges in sparsely furnished metallic apartment complexes.. That's about as deep as the future gets apparently (which I'm fine with). Paris (France) looks a little greyer, and has a couple of new skyscrapers, if you were wondering. So while not immensely creative in its vision, and definitely not "M"-like (M-esque?) in its disavowal of script quality, one sensed that much more time was spent setting up each shot then in writing the dialogue.

The sci-fi twist involves a machine which allows people (mostly bad guys) to erase memory and re-program personalities, although interestingly the machine was created for good reasons (.....like.....leave it with me) and was stolen by the evil do-ers and used for malicious purposes. There are numerous bloody, bone-crunching, cartilege-julienning showdowns between the psychopathic tortured lead (policeman David Hoffman) and the psychopathic mercenary baddy (Nikolov). David has his memory erased in the third act (which I saw as a bit of a positive) but annoyingly still recognizes Nikolov in the cosmetic surgery clinic where this unlikely retinue seem to hang out, thereby engaging in another mano-a-mano for, oh say, nine minutes. Maybe I just don't like "action" sequences but this stuff is dull with a capital B.

In the end David is fine but chooses to forego his memory, recognizing that he's not sure likes that guy he was. Fair enough.

And I wonder what the same strong raw material would have yielded in the hands of a Teutonic or Slavic director?