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Frantic
1988 Action / Crime / Drama / Thriller
 Review
All too easily overlooked, Frantic
is a compelling, well-crafted thriller which stands up well alongside
director Roman Polanski’s other cinematic achievements.
Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of the slick noir thrillers that
were prevalent in France in the 1980s. Comparisons with
Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) and Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) are easily
made. The setting is the same: an austere dreamlike Paris, where
the authorities and the criminals occupy the same moral territory and
where danger lurks on every boulevard. The central character is a classic
film noir hero, an outsider who finds himself thrown into
life-and-death game about which he knows none of the rules and whose
opponents are unknown and pretty well invisible. Despite being a quintessentially French thriller, Frantic has some obvious Hitchcockian touches and it is not too hard to see the references to Vertigo and North By Northwest. As an amalgam of James Stewart and Cary Grant in these Hitchcock classics, Harrison Ford gives what is arguably the best performance of his career, playing a man who is desperately facing up to the twin demons of French bureaucracy and international gangsterism. There is an intensity, humanity and honest-to-goodness realism to Ford’s performance here that makes many of his better known roles pale into insignificance. Impressive in her first major role, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner proves to be an effective sensual Gallic counterpoint to Ford’s introspective machismo – she is the first truly modern femme fatale. One of the most gripping and entertaining of Roman Polanski’s pure genre films, Frantic is a subtly tongue-in-cheek homage to the French film policier. © CinemaForever.com 2009 Write a review for this film...User Comments
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Director:
Roman Polanski
Starring: Harrison Ford, Betty Buckley, Emmanuelle Seigner, Djiby Soumare, Dominique Virton Synopsis
Dr Richard Walker and his wife Sondra, an American couple, arrive in
Paris ahead of a medical conference at which Dr Walker is to give a
paper. Not long after checking into their hotel, Sondra realises
that she has the wrong suitcase and then mysteriously disappears.
Her husband is convinced that she has been abducted but the hotel staff
and the local police seem unconcerned and give him little support in
finding her. Walker finally manages to track down the woman who
took his wife’s suitcase, a professional smuggler named Michelle, but
she can offer no clue to Sondra’s whereabouts. The key to the
mystery is something that Michelle was attempting to smuggle into
France in her suitcase...
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