As a long-time admirer of the beautiful Nathalie Baye, I found
the moment when Commandant Caroline “Caro” Vaudieu of the Paris
police, her character in Xavier Beauvois’s new film, crumples on
the receipt of bad news as if she has been shot terribly poignant.
But it is also a reminder of what has been left out of Le Petit
Lieutenant, this naughty French movie — namely sex. For sex
implies vulnerability, and all of Caro’s energies are required to
prevent hers from being exposed. When on her return to the Parisian
Criminal Investigation Division from which she has been exiled to a
more bureaucratic job, she breaks into that familiar radiant smile,
it is only to remind us of what we will be missing for the rest of
the film. A de-sexualized Nathalie Baye is like a non-violent
Arnold Schwarzenegger. Why would a film featuring either one of
them thus throw away its principal asset?
In fact, there is a reason. For this is a film about blighted
lives — lives with very little in the way of joy or love or hope.
Several of Miss Baye’s scenes take place at AA meetings, and she
sits in them stony-faced, listening to others express emotion
without, apparently, feeling any herself. We can understand
intellectually what her booze-deprivation must feel like, but such
obvious emotional deprivation in such a woman is like a slap in the
face. “Abstinence has not diminished my madness; far from it,” says
one of her fellow alcoholics. But in her it has diminished
everything. That and loneliness. And enduring grief for the loss to
meningitis, many years before, of a young son.
If he had lived, that son would have been about the same age as
Antoine Derouere (Jalil Lespert), the eponymous young lieutenant
just arrived from the provinces by way of the police academy whose
naive excitement at the prospect of being a detective in the big
city comes into her stagnant life and that of her cynical,
hard-bitten colleagues, like a breath of fresh air. He had been
drawn to police work, at first, by the movies, Antoine tells Caro.
He couldn’t bear the thought of being stuck behind a desk. She
warns him that much of the time of an under-cover cop, even in
Paris, is spent behind a desk, doing paperwork, but agrees with him
that the odd case — like that of a serial killer maybe — that she
calls a gros-gros makes it all worthwhile, even if you
only get two or three in a career.
When a drunken Pole (Arthur Smykiewicz) is murdered by a couple
of Russians and they run out of leads, Antoine unself-consciously
says, “Let’s hope they strike again.” Instead of reproving him,
Caro says wonderingly, “This really excites you, doesn’t it?” —
perhaps remembering her own excitement about the job as she now
remembers the taste for gin and night-life that she has had to give
up.
Antoine has left back in Normandy a young wife, Julie (Berangere
Allaux), who has no desire to follow him to Paris. The boredom of a
policeman’s life in Le Havre has no appeal to him; the excitement
of life in the city none for her. In the stalemate between them,
though love survives, we see in embryo the emotional gridlock that
seems to affect all the older characters. The only one of Antoine’s
colleagues with any joie de vivre is a young Moroccan
called Solo (Roschdy Zem), happily married to a French wife with
whom he has two small children. But he is the victim of casual
racism every day.
M. Beauvois spent research time with the Parisian police trying
to acquire a feel for what, at crucial moments, he calls the
“reality” of the contemporary policeman’s lot, and he tries to
convey this by a certain flattening of the narrative arc. He
doesn’t use the hand-held camera of traditional cinema
verite, but he achieves a somewhat similar effect by making
the rather exciting story of the hunt for the murderous Russians
seem to emerge naturally and not too far from the dull routines of
ordinary policework and ordinary police lives. The problem is that
this is rather familiar cinematic territory. They used to do a
parody on the Letterman show called “Cop on the Edge” to make fun
of what has become the movie cliche of police burnout. “That’s the
French police for you,” says one of them: “a lot of wine, a lot of
suicides” Yeah, that’s the generic police for you too.
Such self-consciousness about post-traumatic stress in those
exposed to violence and death and the various and unpalatable forms
of self-medication it elicits — now also a staple of war movies —
has on me the opposite effect to that which is intended. Instead of
making them seem more “real,” it makes them seem less so. They look
too much like every other movie cop. Maybe it’s really the
emotionally cauterized older cops who have seen too many movies,
not happy-go-lucky Antoine. That Xavier Beauvois is himself dimly
aware of this is suggested by his allowing him to keep his
enthusiasm to the end — albeit in a way that can give us little
satisfaction — instead of becoming emotionally stunted and
embittered. Perhaps he would have wished to have a chance to be a
burnout.
At one point, Antoine describes to his father, on a visit home,
his observation of an autopsy performed on the dead Pole. “I saw
the heart and the lungs and the other organs laid out as if they
were on a butcher’s slab,” he says, “and I thought of Mozart. How
can that stuff compose such music?” His father wonders if
the police are making a “mystic” of him. But it’s all the reminder
we need, perhaps, in this highly engaging film that “reality” is
not only visceral and harsh and disgusting and disillusioning but
also has room for the best of humanity.
