Inspector Bellamy

Oh, goodie! A French murder mystery! This ought to be fun. Well, I don't know about fun, but it was entertaining, but now that's over I am not sure why. I mean nothing happens. We go through a bunch of motions, and some weird stuff happens, but we know exactly as much about the "murder" at the end as we did at the beginning. I think what saved this movie was the editing. It could easily have had lots of drawn out scenes with lots of dialog and long lingering shots of this, that and the other, but they didn't. They cut the scenes short, sometimes almost too short. You think the scene is going to run on for a bit so they can tell you something, but they don't. They have already told you the important stuff, no need to repeat it or embroider it.

The basic plot is one we've seen before: married guy falls in love with his girlfriend and then stages his death to collect on his life insurance. He even goes to the trouble to get plastic surgery and a fake ID. Except the insurance money is for the wife he is leaving. The plot unravels before we are even on the scene. The cops have figured out that the guy who died in the fiery car crash wasn't the owner of the car. Modern forensics, you know. Actually it was fairly primitive forensics. The guy's jaw bone didn't match his dental X-rays.

The plastic surgery was pointless, the guy was obviously the same guy, he just shaved his beard off, and the fake ID must have been really cheap because the Inspector spotted it right away. I got to thinking about this later. Fake documents are a staple of crime stories, but they are usually very expensive and "impossible to tell from the real thing", but it occurred to me that for run of the mill kind of security checks, cheap ID's might work just fine, you know, kind of like the press passes you show to the security guards. If you are dealing with someone who doesn't look at too many ID's, or someone who has already seen a thousand of them this morning, your cheap fake may just work.

Inspector Bellamy (Gérard Depardieu, again!), on vacation at his wife's family home in Nimes, get's pulled in by the mastermind behind this plot. He (the mastermind) is confused, upset, distraught? Hard to tell, in any case he's basically incoherent. Inspector Bellamy is intrigued and proceeds to tease the story out of this guy, and the various women involved: the wife, the girlfriend, and the dead guy's ex-girlfriend (picture).

Funny thing about movies. We'll accept fat guys on the screen, but not fat women. All four of the women in this movie are thin as rails. Gérard is fat. He's always been a big guy, but from 2001 (Vidocq) to 2009 (this movie) he has ballooned to the size of a whale. One scene with his wife lying on top of him on the bed (clothed) emphasizes his whale-like quality. Another thing about Gérard that I don't get is women being attracted to him, but then maybe women see something different. I noticed this in another movie of his: Vatel.

There are all kinds of little stories going on inside this movie. Gérard's user half-brother is one of the bigger ones. The guy is just a disaster, but what are you going to do? He's family. Then there's the dead guy's story, and how he ended up dead, which is curious because we only have the mastermind's word for what happened. The defense mounted by the kid lawyer at the end is amusing. All in all, very entertaining.