Le Choc

Any film starring Alain Delon as a hitman will have to reckon in some way with Le Samouraï (1967), in which Jean-Pierre Melville cast the former army paratrooper and then-reigning international heartthrob as existential assassin Jef Costello. While Robin Davis' Le Choc (1982) is as minor league as Melville's classic was major, it nevertheless works an offbeat charm with its admittedly derivative elements to achieve an end result that is unpredictable and hugely entertaining. After pulling a successful hit in Morocco, lone wolf mechanic Martin Terrier (Delon, sporting piss-yellow shooting glasses that telegraph an understandably jaundiced view of the world) informs crime boss Cox (François Perrot, from Bernard Tavernier's Life and Nothing But [1989]) that he wants out of the "organization." True to form for this kind of story, Martin (whom others know as Christian) finds his retirement to be much more complicated than expected, as Cox and his associates refuse to accept that "non c'est non." Visiting the provincial turkey farm purchased for him by his business manager (an unbilled Stéphane Audran, between jobs for Claude Chabrol), Martin insinuates himself between the farm's alcoholic overseer, Félix (Philippe Léotard, brilliant in Bob Swaim's La Balance that same year) and the man's lonely wife, Claire (a somewhat deglamorized Catherine Deneuve). With a blossoming infidelity complicating the simple life, things take a fatal turn when German terrorists attempt a retaliatory hit on Martin for having assassinated their leader in Düsseldorf in 1979. Barely escaping the home invasion with their lives, Martin and his lover head for Paris, where they find their hope of a new life together squashed in the machinery of greed and betrayal. Le Choc was the second time French film legends Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve were cast together in a narrative film. A decade beyond their first go-round as two thirds of a doomed romantic triangle in Le Flic (1972), Jean-Pierre Melville's final film, both stars are showing their age here – the nearly fifty year-old Delon with skeins of gray running through his ink-colored hair and fortyish Deneuve with a softening of her once glacially perfect features. Rather than making the actors seem sadly beyond their time, the aging of the actors works in favor of their wounded, withdrawn characters, resulting in a love story that is, for all its clichéd elements (the love triangle, the furtive glances, the swell of strings during the walk on the beach and the tasteful, candle-lit lovemaking) surprisingly tender and even poignant for one underscored with machine gun bursts and the squeal of tires on Paris pavement. (Despite his years, Delon consents to a bit of discreet full frontal nudity glimpsed through a glazed shower door.) Through the first half of Le Choc, the viewer never quite knows whether Davis and his screenwriters (Delon credited among them) are doing a piss take on the standard one-last-job story (Delon's hitter is introduced in a highly unlikely but certainly original pursuit between horse-drawn carriages) but just as the proceedings seem to be settling into domestic drama doldrums, the guns come out, squibs explode juicily and Deneuve is thrusting an andiron through the breadbasket of Teutonic she-wolf Dani Kogan. (The actress would be doing considerably more damage the following year, as an artery gouging bloodsucker in Tony Scott's The Hunger.) Le Choc turbines up for its last act, which boasts an impressive body count by the final frames and a surprisingly hopeful fade out. Le Choc has been included in Lionsgate's five-film Catherine Deneuve collection. Paired on one of the set's three discs with Jean Aurel's Manon 70 (1968), Le Choc looks impressive and refreshingly un-dated for a film well over a quarter of a century in age. Letterboxed at 1.66:1 and anamorphically enhanced, the image is clear and colorful, with no gross blemishes marring the emulsion. The Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack is limited but certainly adequate and while the score by Philippe Sarde (whose brother Alain co-produced) is not a classic by any stretch of the imagination it remains nevertheless charming and memorable. English subtitles are optional. None of the films included in Catherine Deneuve: 5-Film Collection come with supplements and the design of the set's Digipak casing looks a bit Penthouse-ish, with a nonspecific glam shot of the actress adding an unfortunate generic feel to the whole affair, which does the set a disservice. For more information about le Choc, visit Lionsgate. To order Le Choc (available only as part of the Catharine Deneuve 5-Film Collection), go to TCM Shopping. by Richard Harland Smith