Pialat originally hired Catherine Breillat to adapt an American detective novel (the French-translated title of which would be placed on a completely different film, À nos amours), yet differences between the two led to a dramatic fallout. What remains of Breillat’s contribution is her thorough research into the world of French undercover police. She maintains that all of the officers’ dialogue is taken verbatim from actual conversations and interrogations. Only Gérard Depardieu’s character Mangin is a complete creation; the rest of the cast is either based on or played by actual police officers and gangsters. Thus, despite Pialat taking on an impersonal genre picture along with the star power of Depardieu and Sophie Marceau, Police remains a Pialat film in its patient half-documentary realism, its dislocating sense of time, its aversion toward narrative convention and its incestuous “family” of police, lawyers and criminals—many of whom work both sides and seem morally confused about their fluid identities and loyalties. When an unexpected love story erupts from this commingling, it creates a momentarily liberating space—disconcerting to both officer and “criminal,” who are used to role playing—and leads to a decision by Mangin to jeopardize himself professionally with unpredictable, quietly stated results that run defiantly and tenderly against the violent expectations of the noir and the polar.