It is a movie about questions. It’s concerning the official enterprise of asking them, the brand new ones that immediately supplant answered ones and the squashed ones that poison all probabilities of social equality. A solution that German-French director Dominik Moll is joyful to provide, nonetheless, is in response to Inspector Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker) as she talks to her teenage son. “Why does everybody hate the police?” she asks as he appears to be like at her from mattress, ashamed of her career.
“File 137” is a dramatization of a particular case of police brutality that befell in Paris in 2018, throughout what is called the Yellow Vests protests. Though it takes a while to indicate its hand, by the top “ACAB” would work as its tagline – nicely “MCAB” with its main woman as the rationale to alter the phrase “all” to “most”.
Stéphanie Bertrand works in Paris for the IGPN (L’inspection générale de la police nationale). As inside affairs, she – as an antagonistic rival says – “investigates colleagues relatively than criminals”. This makes her about as fashionable as a water cannon at a paddling pool occasion. Nonetheless, the movie sides together with her. Her arc is to emerge as the great apple, the exception to the rule, whilst her personal integrity is named into query for daring to see humanity in these exterior of her career.
The movie lifts its inciting occasion wholesale from an actual occasion on 1 December 2018 by which the yellow vests — a grassroots collective from throughout the political spectrum — got here out to protest a hike in gasoline tax by then French President, Emmanuel Macron. That night time noticed riots, fires, and mass accidents and arrests. Moll makes use of blended media so as to add texture to a narrative that may in any other case unfold completely in rooms filled with folders, whiteboards and tables. Accounts of the night time itself are informed by the oblong information of an iPhone with footage of the fictional characters blended with actual archival materials.
This doesn’t really feel like a gimmick a lot as a manner of getting direct entry to characters that we might in any other case solely see after they’ve been overwhelmed down by state violence. To see them heading to protest — younger, vibrant and optimistic — is Moll’s manner of exhibiting solidarity. Different sources of visible knowledge are used to place us contained in the digital areas that Stéphanie inhabits. CCTV digicam footage and Google Maps are instruments that assist her and her two IGPN colleagues to place collectively what occurred at a particular incident.
We meet Stéphanie in 2019 as she is working a caseload arising from 1 December. There’s rather a lot to get by as lots of her colleagues used the charged ambiance as a possibility to vent their violent urges. “After 15 years clear, I snapped,” says one policeman who threw a rock at protestors. In contrast to those that come later, he’s trustworthy and contrite. It’s a comparatively easy enterprise for Stéphanie to refer the case on to the prosecutor for judgement.
Subsequent up is a distraught lady named Joëlle (Sandra Columbo) whose son Guillaume is in hospital with a fractured cranium as the results of being shot within the head with a riot gun. She desires to know who did this to him. Joëlle hails from St Dizier, the suburb the place Stéphanie grew up and the place her mother and father nonetheless dwell. This recognition unlocks a beforehand untapped private motivation.
The nice Léa Drucker (final seen in Cannes having an affair with a 17-year-old in Catherine Breillat’s “Final Summer season”) is — this yr — proving that she will play restrained and accountable adults. In Laura Wandel’s Critic’s Week opener, “Adam’s Sake” she is a pediatric nurse coping with a case of doable parental abuse. As Stéphanie, she convinces as a centered and clever skilled with a simple allure that papers over the script’s disinterest in her inside life.
We’re afforded entry to her home areas, bearing witness to loosely sketched relational dynamics with each her mother and father and her son. Regardless of a consuming job, she has time for everybody. There’s a ludicrously charming scene that includes the rescue of a grimy kitten that Stéphanie washes clear within the sink guided by an internet tutorial. The symbolism is clear. She cares for the susceptible. There are few edges to her character. Save for a closing monologue that spells out a point-of-view already evident in her efficiency, she is poise itself, saying and doing precisely what is required.
There is an edge allowed in considered one of a handful of stand-out scenes. Whereas attempting to find a video recording of Guillaume’s taking pictures, Stéphanie interviews a maid that she suspects is holding one thing again. Like many a maverick cop earlier than her, the normally by-the-book, Stéphanie follows the maid — by the metro, on a darkish path by a park — till she will have the dialog that she seeks. The maid, Alicia, is performed by the nice Guslagie Malanda, star of Alice Diop’s courtroom drama/cri du coeur on ambivalent motherhood “Saint Omer”. Her simmering display presence, full of uncooked distrust reveals — in contrast — the skinny ambiance within the majority of the scenes.
The screenplay by Moll and Gilles Marchand prioritizes verbalizing the step-by-step realization of who shot Guillaume and leans on expositional dialogue to maneuver issues alongside. This is smart in a line of labor the place exposition is the secret and there’s a dogged thoroughness and a precision with terminology that fits the subject material. Nonetheless, the moments when Moll lets the photographs reveal as a lot because the dialogue are those that linger. The distinction between two slight feminine IGPN officers and one giant brawny male officer makes menacingly actual the facility play underlying an interview. Certainly the relative smallness of the IGPN’s stature tees up one closing query, requested of Stéphanie by somebody brutally denied a solution : “You probably did your job very nicely however what use is your job?”
Grade: B
“File 137” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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