Comment by Magic Marmalade:
The strength of a good story is in the telling...
...And this is a potentially great story, told badly.
I remember this being a movie with a lot of buzz around it at the time of release, Mainly, due the "involvement" of Quentin Tarantino - of which much is made on the DVD cover and poster, but is in reality only a production credit, being written and directed instead, by Roger Avary.
That buzz being a mixed bag of good to bad reviews. I never got around to seeing it then, as it was also one of those "mayfly" movies, that appear to be everywhere for a short spell, before evidently disappearing entirely from public consciousness - in short, I forgot it existed.
But now I can see why the reviews are mixed, and why this isn't thought more of, as well as the movie within it, which could have been every bit the equal of a Tarantino "proper" movie, had one key decision been made differently:
Specifically, if this had been restructured in the narrative, cut and edited differently so as the actual bank robbery was the centre of the story, and the two key relationships given in pre-amble were told in flashback from key moments in the robbery, rather than in linear fashion as it is, this would have been an altogether different animal.
As it is, Stoltz (Zed) arrives in France (this has a very contemporary European movie look and feel - as opposed to a Hollywood, or Tarantino one) to meet with Anglade (Eric), in order to embark on this bank robbery with him, but while waiting for Eric, he hooks up with Delpy (Zoe), call girl / student in his hotel room, and a relationship develops, before Eric bursts in and boots her out (before it turns out she is present at the bank they rob).
All of this, and the next two thirds of the film of Zed and Eric doing the town in Paris, is very languid on it's own, even draggy, and boring, and even the beginning of the robbery is somewhat underwhelming, due to a lack of pace you might have expected from this movie...
...But really, that's the real story here, The relationship between Stoltz and Anglade, versus the relationship between him and Delpy, which puts Stoltz in a bind.
If we had come in cold straight into the robbery, then at key points, flashed back, or told those other snippets of story as reveals, the nature of his relationship with each would have unfolded the nature of these, as well as unfolding to the audience the nature of the circumstances, changing our perception of the scenario as we go towards the climax.
This, so rendered, would possibly have been a 9 or a 10 rating for me, but getting to the bank job in linear narrative fashion takes an eternity, and I found I didn't have much interest / energy for the last twenty minutes.
So it's another one, that I wonder, if some talented individual out there were to take this existing material, and "re-cut" it, or reorder and restructure the narrative through this means (maybe making it available to view somewhere - ahem :) - everyone would see what a great film was actually here all along, and even the critics may reappraise it to a much higher degree.
