The Cousin

In the French police an informer is called a cousin. Nounours is one: he takes ten per cent of whatever gets seized on his information. When his handler kills himself, Gérard takes over and finds he has to keep the same arrangement running. Meanwhile an investigating judge is digging into exactly these practices, and the trail runs from the dead officer to Gérard and on to Nounours as the source of the heroin behind a run of fatal overdoses. Alain Corneau's film is less about the mechanics of a case than about how completely the informer and the policeman depend on each other. Patrick Timsit and Alain Chabat star, both of them comic actors playing it entirely straight.