Truands (2007)

Directed by: Frédéric Schoendoerffer | 107 minutes | action, crime | Actors: Benoît Magimel, Philippe Caubère, Béatrice Dalle, Olivier Marchal, Mehdi Nebbou, Tomer Sisley, Ludovic Schoendoerffer, Anne Marivin, Alain Figlarz, Cyril Lecomte, André Peron, Ichem Saïbi, Christophe Maratier, Nicky Marbot, Olivier Bartélémy

Holy Moses! This movie is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard and bloody and explicit. Now we are used to that of the gangster genre, but this film goes a long way in showing violence. Okay, it does support the characters and luckily they are also well developed, so it’s not ’empty’. Yet you may wonder how much a film can show without giving up its entertainment content, after all, we are dealing here with an action film and not an educational film, at least … A ‘truand’ stands for: a truant, or someone who is neglects duty. The title explanation could be that the men in this film are essentially all neglecting their real duty to be reasonable and above all civilized human beings. Here it probably also means: one who places himself above the law; for gangsters, a ‘truand’ is a nickname that underlines their urge to assert themselves without regard for anyone. Which also means you can’t trust anyone but yourself. What a loneliness.

Frédéric Schoendoerffer is the director of the (in the Netherlands) very underrated ‘Agents Secret’ from 2004. This is a kind of more serious variation on ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ (2005). The excellent Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci (also a couple in real life) play the lead roles. It’s a mystery that this movie didn’t do better. The same seems to be happening with ‘Truands’, which again probably has to do with the fact that the film is made in France. Films from that country must either be profound and artistic, it seems, or they must be so special that they have to stand out from the Hollywood crowd, such as ‘Amélie’ (2001).

‘Truands’ isn’t that special in terms of data, nor is it a cinematic milestone, but it is a good film. The acting is good, the story is not too simple and the characters are well developed. In the gangster genre, he is not inferior to his American friends and in some ways is even better. Look, the average American gangster film, if in the A circuit, takes people of the film rating into account. We know that they find it worse that occasionally genitals are in the picture than that people are shot, but there are limits to that too.

Let both now happen in full in ‘Truands’, which can shake it in the States. It is somewhat understandable. Especially the male viewers among us like some beautiful naked women’s bodies and get a kick out of a little violence. Or does Schoendoerffer want to give us the feeling that this isn’t quite jofel? After a movie full of money- and power-hungry maniacs who take out their frustrations with very brutal violence and brutally kill anyone who gets in their way and then treat women like they’re stickers (and they’ll get away with it) you don’t really like a nice picture about the men and their world and you can only ask yourself one thing: will we (people) ever be okay again? You can of course answer that question yourself. We are in any case not finished with the bad guys in the world and hopefully also not with director Schoendoerffer, who can also be seen as an actor in ‘MR 73’, a promising film by Olivier Marchal, who in turn made a big role in ‘Truands’. And so one hand washes the other.