The Vertigo of Popeye Doyle

This Prince, in the year 1744, while hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which threatened to cut short his days. At the news of this, Paris, all in terror, seemed a city taken by storm.-- Thomas Carlyle, The Death of Louis XV

Alain Delon's stagger in his take on the procedural, Frank Riva, is meant to echo the chic swagger of youthful virility. His sang froid serving to explain why every woman in six hours worth of video forgives his abandonment of them is the tired apologia of European cinema. His nemesis, Jacques Perrin, has an interesting ambidextrous hovering over the playing field for 90 minutes,  only then to devolve Xavier into a monotone of unipolar spite which is too strident to hold any further viewing interest, but the series plays Gene Hackman on his deathbed, still playing the French Connection on an intravenous line. People who should be dead relics are only playing possum, and everyone is compromised in some way, caught in the scars which last lifetimes, well into a fourth generation. Maxime Loggia takes quite a beating, and then, in an anachronistic absurdity, gets thrown out of his ruthless uncle's jet. 

But why do French dramatists feel beholden to a film, nearly a half century old, where American cowboys made a dent but never got their man? Is this something European weariness is projecting? It's own antiquity? In Nicolas Le Floch it is a dynamic antiquity, a little too smooth, but not incorrect in the assertion that this is where the modern world begins, in the compassionate savagery of the Enlightenment, just as Rai gets the pathos in De Luca just right: This is my Italy, the post Mussolini world that created my twilight, my tenement demise in a provincial backwater created and landscaped by Quakers, their utopia little more than nigger bling. It is not a block, as per twitter's sugared enthusiasm, only a cripple's death, buffeted by one form of brutality after another.