Dossier 137 – first-look review

In late 2018, France ground to a halt on the back of the ​“gilet jaune” protests in which naffed-off labour­ers downed tools and expressed their grief on the streets. In Paris, mem­bers of the law-enforce­ment anti-ter­ror­ist brigade (BRI) were giv­en a remit to tool up as quick­ly as pos­si­ble and take what­ev­er steps were nec­es­sary to calm ten­sions and sup­press those pro­tes­tors who were deemed a pub­lic men­ace. Get your hel­mets in from the local sports depart­ment store; pick up your anti-riot guns from the station.

This new film by reli­able French direc­tor Dominik Moll zeroes in on the fate of a sin­gle teenag­er who, as the result of this open remit, is shot in the face and suf­fered life-alter­ing brain dam­age as a result. Léa Drucker’s Stéphanie heads up an inter­nal affairs unit – the per­son who polices the police – look­ing into the inci­dent and the rogue band respon­si­ble for destroy­ing this person’s life.

Yet it’s not so easy as just amass­ing the evi­dence and mak­ing the cul­prits pay. The BRI were rid­ing a nation­al PR high after their brav­ery fol­low­ing the 2015 siege of the Bat­a­clan music venue, and so they now pos­sess the image as France’s last line of defense against vio­lent chaos. Stéphanie must tread care­ful­ly and cau­tious­ly in order to bring the net up and around her sus­pects, but all the mem­bers of the unit are unit­ed in their denial that any such malfea­sance occurred on that fate­ful evening.

The first half of Case 137 is its most inter­est­ing, where Moll grinds down into the micro details of the inves­ti­ga­tion and show­cas­es all the tools at Stéphanie and her team’s dis­pos­al. There are points where the film feels like an inno­v­a­tive desk­top pro­ce­dur­al where we snap back and forth between lay­ers of win­dows, see­ing videos of all dif­fer­ent for­mats and res­o­lu­tions and spe­cial data map­ping soft­ware used to cre­ate a minute-by-minute sense of how things esca­lat­ed up to and after this moment. It’s almost like how movies are made!

Yet in its sec­ond half, the film shifts into a more con­ven­tion­al moral debate about the issues that such a case throws up: whether police sol­i­dar­i­ty should be main­tained in all instances so as to main­tain the illu­sion of strength and order, or should the bad eggs be pun­ished as a way to demon­strate that the police are not an impen­e­tra­ble and mono­lith­ic unit who for­mu­late the rules as they go along.

Druck­er is reli­ably superb at the cen­tre of the mêlée, often her­self choos­ing to go off grid in order to secure vital evi­dence for her case. Which itself pos­es the ques­tion of how is this dif­fer­ent to what the BRI offi­cers did? The film ends up ulti­mate­ly both-sidesing the ques­tion, sug­gest­ing that the deep­er that you search for moral equi­lib­ri­um and fair­ness in the eyes of all the rel­e­vant par­ties, the more com­plex things become. The film cer­tain­ly can­ters along at a fair clip, and works as a fun police pro­ce­dur­al, but it ends up spoon­feed­ing the issues rather than hav­ing them ascend nat­u­ral­ly from the story.

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