Subway

I watched this again to see if the integration of flashy Hollywood values into French cinema looked any better fifteen years on, and it really didn't. The movie's extremely loose plot and visual restlessness have their engaging elements, although more in theory than practice: I wish, for example, that the contrast between the initial elegance of the spiky-haired tuxedoed Lambert suggesting a punkish James Bond, and his ultimate incarnation as a doomed Robin Hood, were more interesting. The movie also contains traces of anarchy (Adjani disrupting a constipated upper-class dinner party); conventional send-up (the ineffectual cops); scattered cultural references; and apparent unapologetic self-indulgence. It occasionally makes it as a kind of scrapbook of high-concept images and impressions, but is probably best summed up by Lambert's ineffectual, smirking central void of a protagonist. The final delivery of a would-be significant message through an utterly trashy song doesn't cap it off much.