Croupier 4K 1998 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Jack Manfred is an aspiring writer who, suffering from writer's block, takes a job as a casino croupier to support his literary ambitions. Jack watches the gamblers with the same sense of cold detachment with which he treats the writing of his novel.

He never bets himself, but when a seductive hottie and a casino regular involve him in a dangerous but potentially lucrative scam, Jack believes fortune is on his side. What he doesn't realize is that soon the lure of the game will take him much further than he ever imagined.

Review 4K Movie

An energetic African emigrant is commissioned by a publisher to write a boring commercial novel about soccer machinations. In South Africa, soccer is not yet in vogue - and with the light hand of his father's hero Clive Owen goes to the London casino. The newly minted dealer for the time being equally adept at handling chips and typing about a croupier, until, in search of inspiration, he begins to violate one commandment after another...

It's enough to watch just two of Michael Hodges' films to see where the director's strength lies. Twenty-seven years after his debut, Take Out Carter, he has once again made a stylish and very British noir. Whether set in '70s Newcastle or '90s London, the atmosphere of the lonely hero's cold, existentially challenged surroundings is again wonderfully conveyed. But unlike the uncompromisingly cool and understandable "Carter," this movie is realized in a much trickier way.

And it's not just that conceptually "The Croupier" is filmed as a double narrative on behalf of the writer and the hero of the novel, where a voice-over narration marks the chapters of the book (the idea is not new, Fassbinder, for example, even flipped pages in one of his films). It's not even that in Hodges' film everyone disappoints each other: Jack cheats the publisher, his father cheats himself, the casino cheats the rich customers, and Hodges cheats the audience, expecting a deep dive into the vicious world of gambling. "Croupier" doesn't describe in detail the structure of the casino or the obsession with gambling for any other reason. It's just that this movie is about something else. About the painful unfreedom of a writer driven into the confines of an unloved subject. About the elusive freedom of a professional croupier, standing above the players and the Game, but still forced to dispassionately observe its rules. But you can not cheat nature, and the tension makes itself felt. That is why the novel is written so stilted. Yes, and the main character is only outwardly James Bond, but in fact got a punch in the nose Jake Gittis. And his position as a cold observer, using the energy and passion of the players to write a novel, is safe only for the time being - until he himself gets into a conventional "Chinatown".

One would like to believe that it is the "book" concept and the agony of creativity that explains the deliberate superficiality and at the same time the exaggerated external appeal of Croupier. All these cheap stereotypes played up by the film are exactly in line with the kind of reading that Jack writes. If noir, then the obligatory atmosphere of cold cynicism, if a writer, then a hat and clouds of cigarette smoke. The Russian mafia is replaced by the Greek one, and thank goodness for that. And only the fact that this is a novel in which certain chapters are either omitted or simply invented by Jack can explain the discontinuity and obvious unrealism of some episodes, as well as the obviously borrowed from Polanski equivocation with Jack-Jake, increasingly crumpled closer to the finale.

We, unfortunately, have no choice during the hour and a half - to be the player or the croupier. We can only be spectators. The novel is finished, the ending is wrinkled, the stakes are gone.