Léa Drucker in Smart French Police Procedural

In director Dominik Moll’s very good 2022 police thriller, The Night time of the twelfth, the main target was on French detectives pursuing a vicious killer who was endlessly out of attain. The nearer they got here to nabbing him, the extra he acquired away, leaving them to show in circles yr after yr throughout an extended, existential quest that left none of them unscathed.

In that film, the cops have been flawed human beings and clearly chauvinistic (there was just one girl on the squad), however they have been nonetheless the great guys. In File 137, a piercing slow-burn examination of police brutality, the tables have turned and the cops have turn into the criminals, making us query the very notion of policing in a France racked by social unrest and sophistication division. Made with the identical laser-cut precision as his earlier work, however with a better emphasis on process than earlier than, Moll’s new thriller places the viewer in an uneasy place — between regulation and order, good cop and dangerous cop, protester and rioter — elevating questions for which there aren’t any straightforward solutions.

If The Night time of the twelfth, which was tailored from the memorable guide by Pauline Guéna, had hints of Zodiac and Reminiscences of Homicide in its catch-a-killer situation, File 137 feels nearer to sure episodes of The Wire. Instructed from the point-of-view of Stéphanie (Léa Drucker), an officer serving within the IGPN — what the French name “la police de police,” what we name inner affairs — the movie is loaded with procedural jargon and doesn’t skip a beat when depicting the numerous steps required to conduct a full-scale investigation throughout the division. At almost two hours, the strain can dissipate at occasions, however Moll and common co-writer Gilles Marchand flip what may have been dry materials right into a provocative account of regulation enforcement in modern France.

The 2 have been impressed by actual occasions that occurred again in 2018, when the Yellow Vest protests result in violent skirmishes on the streets of Paris and different main cities. A number of protesters have been injured, a few of them critically, by Flash-balls fired by riot police, or by cops despatched out to quell demonstrations that have been rising more and more unwieldy. At one level, President Emmanuel Macron even ordered armored autos to roll down Paris’ boulevards.

Moll’s fictional account is ready at the moment, and it’s suffering from interviews, mobile phone footage and the occasional information broadcast. On the coronary heart of its story is an incident wherein a younger protester, Guillaume Girard (Côme Peronnet), is severely wounded by Flash-ball fireplace close to the Champs-Elysées. Stéphanie has been tasked with discovering the offender, main her to conduct tons of interrogations, typically of the identical folks, and to collect all of the visible proof she will discover.

Together with IGPN companions Benoît (Jonathan Turnbull) and Mathilde (Carole Delarue), she begins to piece collectively what occurred whereas hitting a number of layers of resistance: Guillaume’s household, particularly his outspoken mom Joëlle (Sandra Colombo), by no means trusted cops beforehand and definitely received’t belief them now, giving Stéphanie little to work with. Much more sophisticated are her dealings with riot police and members of the BRI (the French equal of SWAT), who fend off her nosy questions till she lastly compiles sufficient proof to focus on two suspects (Théo Costa-Marini and Théo Navarro Mussy), each of whom fired their Flash-ball weapons at a fleeing Guillaume.  

As a filmmaker, Moll appears to operate like a detective himself, painstakingly following his heroine’s each motion, whether or not on the job or in chosen scenes at dwelling together with her son (Solàn Machado Graner) and a stray cat (named Yoghurt!) she finds in a storage. The film is just not all the time suspenseful, although Moll does flip up the warmth within the third act. However like several good investigation, File 137 bombards us with powerful questions: Is Stéphanie doing the proper factor, or is she overstepping her boundaries at a time when France appears to be on the point of class battle? What function does it serve to police the police, particularly members of the BRI — a few of whom went into the Bataclan through the terrorist assaults? And didn’t the rioters provoke all of this by setting Paris aflame?

The movie tackles these points in opposition to a backdrop of deep division wherein everybody appears to be both a cop or a cop hater. Caught within the center, Stéphanie finds herself more and more at odds together with her fellow officers, culminating in a shifting interrogation the place the tables are turned and her personal bias will get questioned by a superior. Earlier on her ex-husband (Stanislas Merhar), a cop himself, lambasts her for going after fellow officers, to which she replies that if she didn’t do it, “solely assholes could be left.”

The wonderful Drucker (Final Summer season, Custody) offers one other partaking efficiency as a lady attempting to render justice in a rustic torn aside by politics and social grievances. The remainder of the solid does stable work, particularly Turnbull, providing comedian aid as Stéphanie’s hardnosed accomplice. In a single telling apart, the 2 pay a go to to the 5-star Prince de Galles resort, a few of whose home windows overlook the scene of the crime. When Benoît learns {that a} room prices as a lot as his month-to-month wage, he steals a couple of bars of cleaning soap as revenge. Cops might maintain a few of the energy in France, however they’re nonetheless struggling to get by.

The resort sequence results in one of many solely pure moments of suspense in an in any other case chatty film, throughout which Stéphanie follows a chambermaid (Guslagie Malanda from Saint Omer) dwelling on the metro, hoping the girl might know greater than she let on throughout her interrogation. Moll has all the time been a visible director, and he manages to maintain us glued to our seats as the 2 play a delicate sport of cat and mouse on public transportation, till Stéphanie lastly corners her prey. The unhappy irony of that scene, and of File 137 generally, is that each girls actually wish to do the proper factor — solely they reside in a world the place it’s not about proper or incorrect, however about whose aspect you’re on.