Pialat subverts the police thriller, as he had the family melodrama in A Nos Amours, in a story surrounding a cop whose commitment to the law is camouflaged by his capricious appetites. Mangin (Gérard Depardieu) is obsessed with cracking a Tunisian drug ring operating in Paris via Marseilles; to that end, he brutalizes suspects on the theory that "if people get hurt they deserve it in some way." The words come back at him at the film's close, after he's become emotionally involved with the girlfriend of one of the dealers. Police might be dubbed a Paris D. P. Bleu in its quotidian cop-action style. But underneath the comings and goings is a picture of cynicism and loneliness (cop), betrayal and vulnerability (Arabs), frantic survivalism (the Tunisians' lawyer who swings both ways). This is Depardieu's true element; he's relaxed in the ambiguities of mean and nice, cop and criminal, and released by Pialat's improvisatory style. If he's less convincing as the cop who transcends his own mediocrity to fall in love, well, for that we would need a Jean Gabin, and there was only one of him.