Call
it the Gallic corollary to the Broken Windows Theory. By allowing racist
intimidation to continue unchecked, the Gendarmerie actually creates an
environment where drug cartel warfare and hostage-taking can flourish.
Everybody is in the wrong place, at the wrong time during Eric Valette’s Thousand Cuts or Le Serpent aux Mille Coupures (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Fantasia International Film Festival.
There
is a full-scale, all-points manhunt on to capture “The Motorcyclist.” News
reports call him a terrorist, but in France that could just mean he wrote a letter
to the editor criticizing multiculturalism. Regardless, it will be Colombian
drug traffickers waiting for their French connection who stumble across the
mystery man first, but they won’t live to talk about it.
Wounded
in his misadventures, the Motorcyclist forces his way into the bi-racial Petit family’s
farmhouse. For months, the racist yokels have been harassing French-Senegalese
Omar Petit and killing their livestock. As a result, the Petits are not inclined
to call the police and if they did, the coppers would be unlikely to respond.
However, they still must endure a very real hostage crisis. Even though the
Motorcyclist quickly figures out their desperate circumstances and he privately
shows signs of sympathizing, he is still not inclined to trust his hosts.
Meanwhile, when their deal goes sour, the Colombian cartel dispatches their ace
hitman-trouble-shooter to “stabilize” the situation.
Frankly,
aside from the xenophobic rustics, it is pretty confusing just who all the
dozens of bad guys are and which factions they are aligned with. However, there
is no mistaking Terence Yin’s career breakout performance as the blue-eyed
Chinese-German-Colombian assassin-problem-solver. He is absolutely riveting in
a creepily charismatic, discomfortingly sadistic kind of way. Tomer Sisley
(spending time in an even more confining location than in the original Sleepless Night) is all very credible
brooding and throwing down as the Motorcyclist, but he just can’t compare to
Yin. However, Stéphane Debac compliments him nicely, as the cartel’s French
fixer, who is in way over his head, while Pascal Greggory helps humanize the
film as the overwhelmed police chief, who could have avoided a lot of this
trouble if he had been more proactive addressing the plight of the Petits.
