THE CONNECTION
| 2015 – 135′ – Drama, Thriller, Action, Crime.
Written by: Audrey Diwan, Cédric Jimenez.
Directed by: Cédric Jimenez.
Starring: Academy Award-winning Jean Dujardin, Gilles Lellouche, Benoît Magimel, Guillaume Gouix, Céline Salette, Mélanie Doutey, Bruno Todeschini, Féodor Atkine.
Official Selections Toronto International Film Festival 2014, Rendez-Vous With French Cinema in New York 2015. Two César Award Nomination 2015: Best Production Design, Best Costume Design.
Official Competition COLCOA 2015.
In French with English subtitles.
A Giant Pictures release. |
Confidently striding in where William Friedkin’s The French Connection left off, The Connection answers with the lesser known but equally thrilling true-crime saga of French magistrate Pierre Michel’s obsessive six year battle to make the streets of Marseille safe from Gaëtan Zampa, the infamous drug kingpin known as “La French,” played by Mesrine’s Gilles Lellouche. In 1975, Zampa’s hydra-tentacled heroin distribution ring is just one piece of an empire that includes procuring, extortion, and robbery. Michel, a man of staunch integrity and tenacity sympathetically incarnated by The Artist star Jean Dujardin, faces off against Zampa, a surprisingly anti-drug family man, but with a ruthlessness to rival Michel’s relentlessness. At first, Michel tries to play by the rules, but as his job starts to take on the pitched fury of a crusade, it dawns on him that rules don’t mean a thing against a man who has half of the city’s officials paralyzed with fear, and the other half on his payroll.