A modest film becomes a "great film" in your mind, when you have been avoiding the usual offer for weeks: Los Angeles movies, re-boom of Korean cinema, the Spanish dose, the monthly fee of Latin American pictures, and suddenly something without haste appears, surrounds you, interests you, likes you and leads you to a placid conclusion. Nothing extraordinary happened, but you had a real good time.
Made in 2016, «The Mechanics of Shadows» had that effect on me; it was a relief, after I could not resist more than 10 minutes of «What Happened to Monday», a Netflix science fiction movie whose biggest hook was to put the same actress playing seven sisters. But when the old face of Cluzet appeared, like the civil servant who loses his job, goes to meetings Alcoholics Anonymous reunions, where he meets Alba Rohrwacher, and the soundtrack was not in English and there was no hip-hop, I risked saying to myself, "This I'm going to enjoy". And yes, I did.
Francois Cluzet, an actor who has been in cinema longer than it seems, suddenly receives a job offer: all he has to do is transcribe recordings made by a security agency , which supposedly defends the security of "la France", and turns out to be a Parallax Corporation-style assassin agency, but without the ostentation of original (in American film «The Parallax View»). It is a pyramid of hidden power, where agents, ruffians and murderers are inserted in the whole social fiber, and from which Cluzet tries to get out, ah, but he does not know what he got into ... and how difficult it is going to cost him to get out. The film is a bit Hitchcockian, with its innocent man, the mousey man, the ordinary gray man who, suddenly, has to release himself from all the death sentences that are accumulating on his back. It is a French "thriller", which means, a little of real time, a few shadows, no hasty and tricky editing, no futile shocks (to say that "something happens") or pretty faces to decorate the cake. And it does not care if you foresee the outcome.
This cinema is as necessary as art cinema, social cinema, junk from L.A. and the pretentious and presumptuous auteur cinema. It is efficient entertainment, made with skill and in a down to earth tone, even if it is telling you a convoluted story, with the right dose of tension, so that later "relaxation" has a better effect.
