File 137: a wise thriller (review)

After The Night of the 12th, Dominik Moll tackles another hot topic, but in a way that is too bureaucratic to create great cinema.

With The Night of the 12thpresented at Cannes Première in 2022, Dominik Moll signed one of the craziest comebacks in the history of French cinema. Critical triumph, great public success (nearly 500,000 admissions in France) and raid on the 2023 Césars (7 prizes including Best Film). A smashing comeback for the director ofHarry, a friend who wishes you well.

In retrospect, we said to ourselves that The Night of the 12th could have been in competition. But it’s finally his new film, File 137who was entitled to this honor last May. After feminicide, Moll tackles another heavy subject, the police violence which punctuated the Yellow Vest movement, with a scenario inspired by real events which takes us back to 2018.

File 137 follows an IGPN investigator, perfectly played by Léa Drucker. She is working on a flashball shooting case which seriously injured a young man in a small street in the Champs Elysées district, on the sidelines of a demonstration.

Like his character, whose minutes recited in voiceover punctuate the film, Dominik Moll treats his subject in a bureaucratic manner. You have to listen to both sides, try not to be biased. Caught between those who denounce the impunity of the police, her fellow cops (including her ex-husband and his new partner) who accuse her of being a traitor, and a management which wants to avoid the discontent of the unions, Stéphanie seeks to bring the truth to light.

The statement is courageous and rather fine, but in wanting to avoid Manichaeism, File 137 fails to get to the heart of the problem. How did the heroes of the Bataclan, whom the French applauded in the streets three years earlier, become the armed wing of a government deaf to the anger of the people? The film asks these questions, but fails to answer them. Moll knows he is walking a minefield, so he takes baby steps through his story. It’s difficult to offer great moments of cinema in this assumed monotony which, certainly, illustrates the reality of a complex situation.

Stéphanie’s son slips her an ACAB point, but she refutes it (without really believing it?). For Moll, we can’t say “All Cops Are Bastards”. “Some Cops Are Bastards”, in a pinch. We will also know nothing about the psychology of the police officers involved, apart from a few interrogation scenes punctuated by their cynical line of defense, which almost becomes a comic spring despite the seriousness of the facts. Why are they “assholes” as our investigator says, and why are we protecting them?

Moll also misses the thriller dimension. He tries to create tension in two somewhat cheap shadowing sequences (one in a hypermarket, the other in the metro), intended to dynamise the bureaucratic tone of the film. But the stakes and the staging are too low for us to hold on to our seats.

However, he succeeds in certain things. Particularly through the key witness, played by Guslagie Malanda (the revelation of Saint Omer), one of the rare secondary characters to manage to exist around Léa Drucker. This black cleaning lady embodies suburban France which did not wait for the Yellow Vest crisis to discover police blunders and open its eyes to a system against which we cannot win. In the same way, he pertinently sketches the disillusions of “peripheral” France, and the ephemeral revolt of roundabouts, with its pallet barricades, which today seems a distant memory.

File 137 is paved with good intentions and great ideas. But it perhaps lacks a twist that would have brought a little surprise and depth to its story. Like in the series Antidisturbios by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, which also dealt with the subject of police policing, but in a much more visceral and confusing way, shaking up the beliefs and convictions of its heroine and the viewer. Moll had this big twist, touched upon at the end of the film, but he preferred the voice of moderation and wisdom. A voice of appeasement, to try to heal a country that is tearing itself apart.