PIGALLE (1994) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Karim Dridi
Véra Briole. Francis Renaud, Raymond Gil,
Bobby Pacha, Bianca Li, Philippe Ambrosini
Paris down and dirty, about a young couple going to hell in the city's red light district. This is not the romanticized Paris of Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly, or Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It's a shadowland of pimps and thieves, whores and hustlers, junkies and gunrunners, hoodlums and killers, every kind of predatory lowlife you'd never want to meet late at night in the city. It's a human sewer in which there's no redemption, and from which there's no escape. Dridi does an effective job of capturing all that, but whether you'll want to spend an hour and a half of your life there is another matter. You can practically smell the urine on the sidewalk.
