There were two great movies from 2001 made using whizzy technological recreations of Paris during revolutionary times, Vidocq and Rohmer's The Lady and The Duke. In both cases a modern viewer might be tempted to say that the technology has moved on since then, but whilst technology has moved on, artisanry has been sidelined. Both movies show what's possible when you have committed artisan FX specialists. Vidocq is fake but redolent, whereas far to many films today are convincing but sterile.
Vidocq, played by Gerard Depardieu, is based on a real person, famous for his memoirs. The real-life Eugène François Vidocq was a convict but had an amazing turnaround, founding the Sûreté, and then a private detective agency after having been a convict. He is known as the father of modern criminology.
This movie however is more about an hallucination of Vidocq and of those times. It is a highly visual and frenetic movie. I would not be surprised if Pitof were to have been inspired by François Gérard's portrait of Charles X, when making this movie (this movie is set during his reign and frequently mentions him). In it you can see both the colour scheme of the movie, dingy gold and ghostly white and the wealthy narcissism of the murder victims. The movie has very much a graphic novel feel, and no surprise that Richard Nolane drew a trilogy of Vidocq stories in the 2010s.
The plot of the movie is generally considered to be holey, to me it's more that it sits uneasily, if of course, one wants to spend time thinking about it. For me it's just very nice to be propelled through a series of vignettes of a miasmic Paris.
Vidocq, played by Gerard Depardieu, is based on a real person, famous for his memoirs. The real-life Eugène François Vidocq was a convict but had an amazing turnaround, founding the Sûreté, and then a private detective agency after having been a convict. He is known as the father of modern criminology.
This movie however is more about an hallucination of Vidocq and of those times. It is a highly visual and frenetic movie. I would not be surprised if Pitof were to have been inspired by François Gérard's portrait of Charles X, when making this movie (this movie is set during his reign and frequently mentions him). In it you can see both the colour scheme of the movie, dingy gold and ghostly white and the wealthy narcissism of the murder victims. The movie has very much a graphic novel feel, and no surprise that Richard Nolane drew a trilogy of Vidocq stories in the 2010s.
The plot of the movie is generally considered to be holey, to me it's more that it sits uneasily, if of course, one wants to spend time thinking about it. For me it's just very nice to be propelled through a series of vignettes of a miasmic Paris.