Latest news with #TheNightofthe12th
Time Out
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Photograph: Cannes Film Festival
Back in 2022, The Night of the 12th examined an all-male detective team's attempts to solve the murder of a young woman in a small town and exposed sad truths about how women are perceived and treated. As its title suggests, his new film finds director Dominik Moll delving back into another true life case. This time, the French filmmaker digs into an internal affairs investigation of officers suspected of shooting and badly wounding a young man with rubber bullets at a 2018 Yellow Vest (' gilets jaunes ') demonstration in Paris. Dogged police officer Stephanie Bertrand (a superb Léa Drucker) methodically leads investigators through each aspect of the case, detailing life-changing head injuries that put teenager Guillaume in hospital, assessing the impact on his mother Joëlle and finding out who fired the weapon via tricky interrogations of suspects. She also interviews Guillaume's friend Remi, present at the incident, who has been rapidly charged, tried and jailed for three months for his part in the demonstrations. In a crucial moment, Stephanie takes her team to the road off the Champs-Élysées where the shooting happened, identifying a spot where a witness had a clear view of the event. There's a riveting extended sequence where witness Alicia (a hotel maid played by Saint Omer 's Guslagie Malanda) is tracked down at work, briefly interviewed, and then followed by Stephanie. It also opens up another can of worms entirely: would Stephanie's team have been as tenacious if the victim had been a young man of colour instead? Alicia vehemently suggests otherwise. Would the police have been as tenacious if the victim had been a young man of colour? Race aside, the knotty moral complexities of Stephanie's work set Moll's film above seen-one-seen-'em-all procedurals. Joëlle confronts Stephanie in a supermarket demanding to know why action takes so long. Public distrust and hatred of police is keenly expressed and brought up by Stephanie's son (who tells friends his narcotics division father is a teacher). The father's new girlfriend, another narcotics officer and union member, snarks that cops should concentrate on criminals rather than other cops. There's also the thorny nature of who the suspects are: members of the BAC (anti-terror cops who were considered heroes after the Bataclan nightclub terror attack in 2015) who were helping out on the day of the demo. Stephanie is damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Case 137' Director Dominik Moll on Exploring the Gilets Jaunes Riots in His Cannes-Premiering Political Drama: ‘These Divisions Still Exist' in French Society
Dominik Moll, the Cesar-winning French director whose film 'Case 137' world premiered in competition at Cannes on Thursday evening, talked about the timeliness of his movie which tackles police misconduct through the prism of a meticulous investigation. 'Case 137' is set during France's yellow vests protests and centers on a young man who gets injured by by a flash-ball projectile. Léa Drucker, who is also at Cannes with Laura Wandel's 'Adam's Sake,' stars in 'Case 137' as an investigator in the French IGPN (internal affairs) department who is assigned the task of determining who is responsible for the incident. More from Variety São Paulo's Film Cash Rebate Delivers Early Wins, Sets Stage for 2025 Edition Brazil's Trailblazing Film-TV Org Spcine Turns 10 'Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou's Solo Debut Pulses Like Taipei After Dark Moll started working on the project years ago, during the violent Gilets Jaunes protests that rocked the country in 2018 and 2019 as a vehicle to probe divides in French society. Yet, the film wasn't meant to be a bombshell political thriller as was Ladj Ly's 'Les Miserables' or Romain Gavras' 'Athena,' to name a couple French movies looking at police brutality. 'I don't like the idea of a film 'coup de poing,'' said Moll. 'What I like to do is try to explain how an institution works.' Speaking of the backdrop of the Gilets Jaunes riots, Moll said: 'It was a period that eroded political power and led to reactions and overreactions in terms of the deployment of law enforcement. It's a movement that really exposed the divisions that exist in French society, particularly between the big cities and Paris, and small towns or rural areas where many people feel invisible and ignored, or where public services are declining. It was quite symptomatic of that.' 'Now, it feels like it's very far away, but these divisions still exist, and it seemed like a good way to talk about them, especially since the Gilets Jaunes movement is now really part of French history. I think it's important to tackle issues like this,' Moll continued. The film marks Moll's follow up to 'The Night of the 12th' which charted a police investigation surrounding the gruesome murder of a young woman. The film struck a chord in France and won an impressive six prizes at the Cesar Awards, including best film, director and adapted screenplay for Moll and Gilles Marchand, as well as promising actor for Bastien Bouillon. Drawing a parallel between the two movies, Moll said 'The Night of the 12th' 'really made me want to continue my interest in police institutions and how they work.' 'The advantage of police investigations is that you can work on cases from the field, with all the tension and suspense, etc. and you can also slip in other themes,' said Moll. 'In 'The Night of the 12th, it was violence against women. Here, it's more about police violence during law enforcement operations, but through a police investigation conducted by the IGPN, the police watchdog. That's what interested me. I felt there was material for fiction in seeing police officers investigating other police officers.' Caroline Benjo, who produced both 'Case 137' and 'The Nights of the 12th,' with Carole Scotta at Haut et Court, said both movies are 'clearly restorative.' ''The Night of the 12th' was 'a very harsh film, even a little grim and very graphic, and yet it felt cathartic,' Benjo said. 'I feel that with Dominique, the way he invests in spaces (…) which are the grey areas. It's these grey areas, those of nuance and complexity, that we have completely abandoned, when in reality they are the ones we absolutely must reconnect with,' said the producer. 'Case 137' has been critically lauded, with Variety's review describing it as a 'starkly effective' and 'riveting police procedural,' and praising Drucker's 'superb' performance as a 'dogged inspector investigating an egregious case of riot police misconduct.' Before its premiere, 'Case 137' sparked some headlines after news broke that one of its supporting actors, Theo Navarro-Mussy, had been banned by the Cannes Film Festival organizers from walking the red carpet amid accusations of rape and sexual assault. 'Case 137' is represented internationally by of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Case 137' Review: Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural Places Good Cop and Bad Cop on Opposite Sides
'Why does everyone hate the police?' It's a fair and earnest question, lobbed halfway through 'Case 137' by 12-year-old Victor (Solan Machado Graner) at his mother Stéphanie (Léa Drucker) — who has a hard time coming up with a satisfactory answer, not least because she's in the police herself. 'It's not a likable job,' she eventually admits. 'Enforcing the law doesn't make you friends.' He doesn't know the half of it. Stéphanie is no standard cop, but an investigator in the French IGPN (internal affairs) department, making professional enemies left and right as she investigates various cases of police brutality and misconduct — while outside the force, she finds herself tarred by the same ACAB brush as those she's bringing to account. Not that Dominik Moll's clear-eyed, fuss-free and entirely gripping procedural drama asks viewers to shed any tears for her: Personal integrity ultimately counts for little in service of a crooked institution. 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. More from Variety São Paulo's Film Cash Rebate Delivers Early Wins, Sets Stage for 2025 Edition Brazil's Trailblazing Film-TV Org Spcine Turns 10 'Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou's Solo Debut Pulses Like Taipei After Dark 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. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
