Cédric Klapisch's Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) | Not For, or Against (Quite the Contrary) (2003)

This was a surprise film release from director Cédric Klapisch, as it is a film policier, but what surprises me more is the title, faithfully translated in the same way in English, although surely this must be one of the most clumsy titles on record, particularly with its words in parentheses? OK, the title alludes to the dilemmas of the protagonist, but relevant or not it's still a mess as a title. The film itself though, in spite of a number of professional critics writing otherwise, certainly isn't a mess.

Katy (Marie Gillain) works as a television camera operator but lives in a faceless HLM with little success of escaping her relatively poor surroundings: pathetically, she buys scratchcards in the very slim hope of improving her material situation. Until, that is, she chances upon the crook Jean (Vincent Elbaz), who wants her to film a hold-up for him. At first dubious, as she's entering a milieu foreign to her, she rapidly succumbs to the lure of potential wealth from illegal acts.

So she's introduced to the rest of the gang, a motley bunch aspiring for riches by whatever violent means they get them: there's the Armenian Lecarpe (Simon Abkarian), running a kebab house with his wife; there's Mouss (Zinedine Soualem), an aspiring choreographer working on strippers in a nightclub; and then there's the rather disturbed young Loulou (Dimitri Storoge): not exactly too promising a mob.

But Jean manages to seduce her with his apparently easy gunpoint hold-ups of jewellers and she soon fits into the scheme of things. More importantly, she performs her own hold-ups of jewellers on the quiet. Then comes the final raid, which will pay enough money for them all to live luxuriously for the rest of their lives. But it depends on her playing prostitute to the director of the bank, and she doesn't do prostitution: yeh, she's being used.

She does kill the director though, but fails to have the alarm silenced. However, an amount of money is salvaged from this, although (through her cunning, her intelligence and her betrayal) Caty manages to escape to an American 'paradise', the gang either dead or (in Jean's case) inside. Trouble is, that last long shot of her in her penthouse reveals that she has no idea of where to go from then on. Earlier in the film she mentions the word 'L'argent' and one of her new buddies adds '...ne fait pas le bonheur' ('Money doesn't buy you happiness'). So where is there to go now?