Inspector Bellamy

Two of the giants of French cinema, Claude Chabrol and Gérard Depardieu, team up for the only time for the director's 50th and final feature film, a wry thriller about a police commissioner trying to balance professional instinct with family duty. Once again, Paul Bellamy (Depardieu) and his wife are spending their vacation at her family home in a quiet town. But just as they're settling into their reassuringly predictable holiday routine, his perennially troubled younger brother shows up, joined by a mysterious stranger seeking Bellamy's protection.

“Depardieu and Cornillac's sibling rivalry, which segues between mostly verbal smackdowns and liquored-up bursts of merriment, is beautifully observed.” (Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York)

“A diabolically witty homage to the mystery writer Georges Simenon.” (Stephen Holden, New York Times)

“The ease and professionalism that distinguished this prolific director’s later work is very much in evidence, as is an insouciant attitude, at once resigned and dismissive, toward mortality. The first thing you see is a graveyard, and the first sound you hear is whistling...[the] story, complete with a wronged wife (Marie Matheron), a possibly treacherous mistress (Vahina Giocante) and a soulful homeless man (also Mr. Gamblin), is intricate and intriguing, mainly because of the counterpoint it provides to Paul’s own life. The deceit, self-delusion and wayward desires that drive the apparent perpetrator are legible to Bellamy in a way that his own dangerous impulses (and those of the people closest to him) are not. His eyes are sharp, his blind spots are large, and it is the interplay of clarity and confusion — and also of anguish and comedy — that gives the film its brisk, fascinating rhythm. Chabrol was sometimes referred to as “the French Hitchcock,” a tribute to his skill at building suspense through the ruthless and elegant control of visual and narrative information. But “Inspector Bellamy,” like his other late films (“Comedy of Power” and “A Girl Cut in Two,” for example), is much looser and more relaxed than the work from earlier decades (“Les Biches,” “Le Boucher,” “La Femme Infidèle”) that established his reputation. The formal control is still apparent — every shot counts, as always — but there is also an off-hand generosity, a leisurely delight in odd details and tangents of the story. The movie is in no hurry to end, much as its prolific maker never showed much inclination to stop.” (A.O. Scott, New York Times)