A PURE FORMALITY: Drama. Starring Gerard Depardieu and Roman Polanski. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. (PG-13. 108 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Opera Plaza.)
The ending of "A Pure Formality" actually reverberates backward, trivializing most of what has gone before. You walk out feeling cheated, and it's very easy to forget that the picture is 98 minutes of a very good movie.
A French-Italian co-production, "A Pure Formality" was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, who also came up with the story. The director of "Everybody's Fine" and "Cinema Paradiso," Tornatore has heretofore been associated with wistful, nostalgic films.
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"A Pure Formality," which opens today at Opera Plaza, is a complete departure. Set in a remote police station in rural France during a thunderstorm, the film is grim and intense, consisting mainly of the interrogation of a celebrity murder suspect by a crafty
small-town police inspector.
Gerard Depardieu, the mountain man of international cinema, plays the suspect, who is taken in by police when he is found running in the rain near the death site. He is a mess as only Depardieu can be a mess -- lumbering and slovenly -- and looks about as innocent as a bad-guy wrestler.
Throughout most of "A Pure Formality" the audience does not know whether our hero is guilty, just that he is desperate to get away from the police, and that desperation -- ably conveyed by De
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pardieu -- makes him immediately sympathetic.
"A Pure Formality" resembles "Death and the Maiden" for its play-like construction and for the way it makes the audience sympathize with the accused. Coincidentally, Roman Polanski, the director of "Death and the Maiden," is present in front of the camera here, as the tired veteran inspector.
When the hulking mess reveals that he is Onoff, the great novelist and playwright, the inspector is skeptical at first. Then he is all smiles at the privilege of getting to meet his favorite writer. Polanski is excellent in these moments -- apologetic and diffident, yet unable to shut off his inspector side completely and just be the fan.
The dank police station looks like a dungeon, and throughout the film there's the sound of the rain outside -- and of the water dripping from the ceiling into pots and basins. Tornatore breaks up the dreariness of the setting with flashbacks in the form of fast-paced montages.
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These flashbacks aren't just tossed off but are triggered in ways that ring psychologically true. In one scene, as Onoff watches the inspector slowly pour wine into a glass, he picks up traces of memory from the night before. Tornatore films it as a whirlwind of disconnected images, interrupted every second or two by a shot of the inspector pouring the wine. It's the perfect cinematic rendering of the state of mind, late at night, of fading in and out of daydreams.
All this artfulness, plus two superb performances -- and in the end Tornatore takes a tense crime drama and turns it into an episode of "The Twilight Zone." Why, oh why.
For the last 10 minutes all there's left to hope for is that the camera will pan up Rod Serling standing there in a narrow-lapelled suit.
