After leaving home in a huff, an adolescent girl falls in with a wrong crowd. Together with two of her male friends, she tries to pull off a hold-up on a bank. This is a bad idea, in both senses of the word. While the three would-be bank robbers fail and gasp like fishes on dry land, it becomes clear that they were manipulated by a handful of professional gangsters in need of a decoy operation...
"Liste noire" is, basically, a crime movie about a middle-aged mother seeking violent revenge for the death of her daughter. It's not a catastrophe of a movie but it isn't very good either. One of the problems involves the various gangsters being chased by the said mother ; the viewer hardly gets to know them, they're just interchangeable evildoers-slash-targets. It would have made a considerable difference if these characters had been drawn as individual persons with their own life histories, environments and vices, or if the dynamics in their gang had been better explained. The various police detectives on the case don't have much of a personality either ; go figure why they do what they do or why they think what they think.
Moreover, the movie seems to hesitate between a psychological depiction of the ravages of grief on the one hand and a full-throated Charles Bronson splatterfest on the other hand. The result is neither fish nor fowl. There's a problem here and I don't know where exactly to situate it - perhaps at the level of the direction, which isn't a thing of beauty.
Still, there are enough twists and turns in the story to make it bearable, and Annie Girardot - a very fine actress indeed - impresses as a law-abiding citizen driven to hatred and madness.
People looking for a better French thriller about grief and revenge might want to take a look at "La mariée était en noir" (The bride wore black).
"Liste noire" is, basically, a crime movie about a middle-aged mother seeking violent revenge for the death of her daughter. It's not a catastrophe of a movie but it isn't very good either. One of the problems involves the various gangsters being chased by the said mother ; the viewer hardly gets to know them, they're just interchangeable evildoers-slash-targets. It would have made a considerable difference if these characters had been drawn as individual persons with their own life histories, environments and vices, or if the dynamics in their gang had been better explained. The various police detectives on the case don't have much of a personality either ; go figure why they do what they do or why they think what they think.
Moreover, the movie seems to hesitate between a psychological depiction of the ravages of grief on the one hand and a full-throated Charles Bronson splatterfest on the other hand. The result is neither fish nor fowl. There's a problem here and I don't know where exactly to situate it - perhaps at the level of the direction, which isn't a thing of beauty.
Still, there are enough twists and turns in the story to make it bearable, and Annie Girardot - a very fine actress indeed - impresses as a law-abiding citizen driven to hatred and madness.
People looking for a better French thriller about grief and revenge might want to take a look at "La mariée était en noir" (The bride wore black).
