‘Case 137' Review: Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural Places Good Cop and Bad Cop on Opposite Sides
After a few years off the French auteur A-list, Moll enjoyed a surge in acclaim (and swept last year's César Awards) with his 2023 film 'The Night of the 12th' — an ostensibly straightforward true-crime policier that revealed more intricately ambiguous moral layers as it unfolded. It was a more sober and stringent genre exercise than the playful Hitchcock homages with which he made his name in the early 2000s, and the change evidently agreed with him. 'Case 137,' premiering as Moll's first Cannes competition entry since 2005's 'Lemming,' ventures even more tautly into pure procedural territory, probing one fictional (but compositely fact-inspired) case involving corrupt Search and Investigation Brigade (or BRI) officers to the very bitter end, with little in the way of sensationalism or sentimentality, but a surprisingly pointed sidebar on cat videos.
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The result should play at least as well with local and international audiences as 'The Night of the 12th' did, given the universal resonance and topicality of its skeptical stance regarding the police — and thanks in no small part to an anchoring performance of substantial complexity and bone-weary humanity by the reliably compelling Léa Drucker. Her character is introduced briskly questioning one officer accused of undue violence while performing crowd control at the populist yellow-vest protests that erupted throughout France in late 2018. He snapped after 15 years of clean and dutiful service, he admits, before begging Stéphanie not to strip him of his job. 'Policing is all I can do,' he pleads. The question of whether he really can do that hangs in the air.
Either way, he's one of many such cases, with the IGPN overwhelmed by the steady influx of complaints stemming from the protests: Laurent Rouan's sharp, disciplined editing files multiple interviews and lines of inquiry into a combined, mounting sense of institutional crisis. If Stéphanie tends toward sympathy with her accused colleagues as she investigates them, her next assignment tests that impulse, as distraught mother and nursing auxiliary Joëlle (Sandra Colombo) claims her 20-year-old son Guillaume was shot in the head, wholly unprovoked, by unidentified BRI officers on a day trip to Paris, leaving him with life-changing injuries. The victim's family and friends are unconvinced that Stéphanie can do much to bring the perpetrators to justice — 'Like you'll believe my word against theirs,' mumbles pal and witness Remi (Valentin Campagne) — and Moll's cool overview of the systemic workings of 'the police's police' rather justifies their caginess.
But the accusation nags at Stéphanie more than most that come across her desk, perhaps in part because she shares a hometown with the family, but more because the extreme evasiveness and defensiveness of the BRI brass she interviews in her preliminary investigation give her every reason to suspect very foul play. Working against her is the relatively high public regard for the BRI in the wake of their response to the 2015 Bataclan attack — even officers accused of vicious brutality get a round of hero's applause when brought out of custody — and an us-against-them approach to her department by seemingly all other police factions. Her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, both cops, treat her with disdain: 'Your half-assed enquiries smear the whole force,' fumes the latter.
Damning video evidence of the officers' identity and their guilt eventually surfaces courtesy of a chance eyewitness ('Saint Omer' star Guslagie Malanda, in a brief, blistering turn) who's initially wary of coming forward — caustically pointing out to Stéphanie that many Black and Arab victims of police violence don't get as much due process as the white victim in this instance. Even with the video secured, however, the case is far from open-and-shut legally: The thin blue line gets awfully blurred as Stéphanie runs into infuriating technicalities and roadblocks from higher-ups. Drucker, initially a crisp, headstrong presence, turns increasingly brittle and recessive as the wheels of injustice turn, seemingly internalizing another, more ruthless question she gets asked in the course of her investigation: 'You do your job well, but what use is your job?'
Humor and texture come via glimpses of her home life as a single mother, with Machado Graner (brother of 'Anatomy of a Fall' breakout Milo) excellent as the testy, vulnerable Victor, an early adolescent just beginning to see his parents and their profession through more jaded eyes. An adorable stray kitten introduces an unexpected note of cuteness, leading Stéphanie into the joys of online cat videos, though her father cautions against such distractions in life: 'When everyone's brainwashed and democracy's dead, you'll regret watching so many kitties.' Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, 'Case 137' keeps its mind strictly on the job.
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