Very rarely a film introduces an event so sickeningly unexpected that the audience is completely thrown off balance. Generally is's a question of the director manipulating the audience as in Hitchcock's masterly "Psycho". On a deeper level there are those examples where tragedy strikes, with awful suddenness, characters one has got to know and emphasise with, to the extent that one is left with a real emotion of grief. I remember the inescapable sadness that descended on "Japanese Story", a film set in the Australian outback which almost had one crying out for the reel to be turned back at a point about two-thirds of the way through. Much the same happens in "Le Petit Lieutenant", a brilliant cop-flick, directed by Xavier Beauvois, that has haunted me these past few days. There are scores of films about everyday police work, so much so that it hardly seemed possible that something new and profoundly moving could come from the genre. I very nearly passed it by. Fortunately an interesting opening sequence where a likable looking young guy passes his police graduation ceremony to the gratification of his likable looking parents and younger brother, generated interest. A certain amount of human feeling perhaps in an ofttimes arid and mechanical genre. Nor was I disappointed as the film progressed. I did not pick up much on the baddies who seemed a rather faceless lot. I wasn't much interested in what they were doing - something to do with immigrants from East Europe, stabbings and a body fished out of the river. It was the cops themselves that were much more clearly delineated - a young Moroccan who had clearly got over a difficult racist start and an older one whose boredom with routine triggers the central tragedy. But it was Antoine, the young "Petit Lieutenant" who had just joined the Paris force who provided one of the two most strikingly rounded characters. He just exuded enthusiasm for his new life, walking jauntily, racing his police car as if it were a new toy, getting sloshed with his mates in a bar. We are not told until a little way into the film that he is married. On his return to his Le Havre home the accusation of neglect by his wife induces an apology. He is a nice guy after all. But there is another character who is to share our attention every bit as much and more as the film deepens - a policewoman Commandant, brilliantly played by that great French actress, Nathalie Baye. A cured alcoholic, she has just returned to a senior position in the force. It is not until after some time that we learn of her losing her seven year old boy to meningitis. The fact that he would now have been the same age as the young police officer creates a rather special bond that is never less than professional. There is a relaxed moment of wonderful irony when they share a joint in a Paris street after nightfall only to be asked by a young man passing by if he can take a puff, after which he advises them to take care as the place is swarming with cops. What follow shortly after is the stuff of tragedy. The case that is being worked on is fairly routine but its consequences are far from that. It hardly matters that there is a chase followed later by a shootout in a different locality. What lingers is the face of Nathalie Baye as she walks by the sea where we share her silent emotions in a final closeup as powerful as that of the young boy in "Les "Quatre Cent Coups". "Le Petit Lieutenant" is a film to be seen twice, When we know what is to come it somehow resonates far more deeply.
Review of The Young Lieutenant
