L.627 is an ill-considered article of the French penal code on drugs, that here gives its name to a curious police procedural thriller from highly regarded French director Bertrand Tavernier.

Groucho Marx lookalike Lulu (Didier Bezace) is a zealous drug squad officer, angry at what he sees as the waste of people's lives on the streets and the concomitant danger of AIDS, fuelled partly by his close friendship with junkie-prostitute Cecile (Lara Guirao). But he's up against it -- his colleagues are either racist or incompetent, and frequently both; the department is starved of proper resources -- forced to arrest petty dealers over suppliers because the superiors see success in terms of statistics over lives; and there's his difficult relationship with his wife, Kathy.

L.627 is at once part of the long tradition of the French policier and somewhat distant from it. If nothing else the police here are, despite their many faults, largely sympathetic, much in contrast to films more typical of the genre like, say, Bob Swaim's celebrated 1982 corruption thriller, La Balance. Either way it contrasts starkly with its Hollywood cousins -- there's no gun-play on the Metro, or extended car chases through picaresque Paris. Indeed, save for the occasional glimpse of the Eiffel Tower above the police station, this could be any unnamed contemporary French city. But it's this diversion from the norm that is also fraught with dangers for director Tavernier, for in opting to concentrate on the day to day, hand to mouth detail of the anti-narcotics squads he eschews any real notion that this is a conventional 'thriller'. There are recurrent characters -- informers, pushers -- but only in the sense that the police come across them in the course of their everyday work. There is no formal outline as such, no strong plotline to be introduced, developed and resolved in three acts. This itself is not a real problem, given that the daily struggles and successes against the odds have very much their own internal fascination, but Tavernier seems unsure when to call it a day. The result, once the audience passes the two hour mark on this grim journey, is a very long 140 minutes that, without any sense of dramatic drive, has a tendency to repetition and seem to run out of steam a good half hour from the end.

Similarly, the two women in Lulu's life are irritatingly insubstantial. The wife is angel-faced and barely seen, while the much more developed Cecile is so unbearably self-obsessed as to leave the viewer wondering just why the cop would even give her a backward glance let alone become fascinated. Worse is the inevitable cliché that Lulu is somehow torn between the archetypal Madonna and Whore figures, the latter providing Tavernier with the opportunity to try and end his film on an intimate note when the audience really couldn't care one way or the other.

In its favour, L.627 has a superb central performance from Bezace, with more than able support from an extremely idiosyncratic, watchable bunch. The script -- by the director and drug squad detective Michel Alexandre -- is satisfyingly gritty if a little too parochial to transfer well to subtitles, and Tavernier assembles it all with the unforced energy of a street-level documentary. Unarguably fascinating then, but far from entertaining.