Arsenevich: Claude Sautet - Max et les ferrailleurs (1971)

Max y los chatarreros

Amargado por la falta de eficacia de la justicia y por la proliferación de la delincuencia profesional, el juez Max (Michel Piccoli) abandona su carrera y se hace detective privado. En una ocasión, para detener a una peligrosa banda, decide infiltrarse en ella. Así es como conoce a Lily (Rommy Schneider), una prostituta que es la novia del jefe. Pronto surgirá entre ellos una irresistible atracción.(FA)

La primera colaboración de Sautet con Claude Néron, Max y los chatarreros inaugura una asociación muy fructífera, una ósmosis que dará al cine de Sautet su singularidad. Al igual que había empezado con Classe tout risque o L'Arme à gauche probando su mano en los thrillers, el director encuentra aquí una trama ideal antes de embarcarse en tramas más sentimentales, comedias de costumbres que son fieles reflejos de una época. Mientras que Piccoli y Romy Schneider se encontrarán regularmente en variaciones de un papel casi siempre idéntico, los personajes aquí están marcados, entre el policía oscuro (con un maquillaje pálido, dándole una cara de payaso triste que a veces es bastante aterradora) y la prostituta manipulada...

Max and the Junkmen

Max et les Ferrailleurs, adapted from a novel by Claude Néron, was filmed in harsh, grainy color in grubby, workaday locations in and around Paris. It has the matter-of-fact look and careful pace of a precinct-house procedural. The film’s central crime is the robbery of a bank branch by a gang of small-timers, and most of the cops are beleaguered, cynical bureaucrats. Max is different. A former administrative judge who at some point in the past traded his gavel for a badge and a gun, he stands out as a somber and aloof figure among his colleagues. His wide-brimmed black hat is closer to what a sheriff in a western might wear than to the standard fedora of the urban lawman, and family money frees him from the necessity of filing expense reports for the bachelor pad he rents or the prostitute he pretends to employ as he pursues his big case.

These are not the perks of ordinary corruption, but rather signs of Max’s perverse and terrifying zeal. He believes, almost as a philosophical conviction, that the only real way to solve a crime is to catch the perpetrator in the act. The problem, of course, is that criminal behavior, like the rest of human life, is rarely predictable enough to ensure that outcome. Max’s solution is to manufacture the crime he will solve. Claude Sautet, who died in 2000, was an original, tough and subtle dramatist with a gift for teasing moral complications out of straightforward genre scenarios. (culled from the NYT)