This is the contemporary French thriller: all form and no substance ;flashy pictures,disturbing characters and poor screenplays. The director obviously relied on his cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Stefania Sandrelli were once in Bertolucci's critically-acclaimed "il conformista";both are very talented actors but neither the rest of the cast nor the story are very exciting : the boy who spies on his neighbor with his telescope ,the average viewer has seen this at least a hundred times or more .("You like astronomy,don't you?" is supposed to be a "funny" line" when the sleuth investigates a murder).The young peeping tom's parents characters are caricatures (they are not educated as their neighbors so when their son plays loud his opera arias ,the crude father calls it "queer music" );as far as the depiction of the bourgeois life is concerned,you 'd better take one of Claude Chabrol's best films (those of the late sixties) any day.
Ditto for the two cops : the old veteran versus the young (not so young anyway)bloody idiot subject is not new either.
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