P’tit Quin­quin

Let’s roll! The dec­la­ra­tion of bungling, twitch­ing Com­man­dant Van der Wey­den (Bernard Pru­vost) of the Nation­al Police, as he and his part­ner Lieu­tenant Car­pen­tier (Philippe Jore) inves­ti­gate the gris­ly dis­cov­ery of human remains inside a dead cow laid out in an old, bare­ly acces­si­ble war bunker.

Yet with ever more corpses emerg­ing, the mobil­i­ty implic­it in Van der Weyden’s catch­phrase con­trasts with Carpentier’s habit of mak­ing sev­en-point turns or dri­ving in cir­cles. This undy­nam­ic duo, much like their enquiry, appears to be going nowhere – although the macabre case does uncov­er all man­ner of half-buried his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al ten­sions in a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty of North­ern France.

As much as human parts do not nat­u­ral­ly belong in a rumi­nant, writer, direc­tor and art­ful mis­er­abilist Bruno Dumont, mak­er of such films as L’Humanite and Camille Claudel 1915, is not nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with com­e­dy (or TV) – but then P’tit Quin­quin, his four-part mini-series made for French tele­vi­sion, is an odd hybrid by any gener­ic mea­sure, show­ing all at once the bes­tial with­in the human, the dev­il in the haystack and some­thing nasty in the wood­shed. With its key­stone kops, odd­ball locals and grue­some grotes­query, P’tit Quin­quin is fun­ny alright – but also deeply unnerving.

It is hard not to think here of the small-town sur­re­al­ism of Twin Peaks (which Dumont claims not to have seen), as coun­try and sea-side set­tings become the locus for all man­ner of bizarrely mys­te­ri­ous goings-on, and a micro­cosm for a state whose present atti­tudes are root­ed in past strife. This is not the pret­ti­fied France of Parisian post­cards, but rather a mud-spat­tered milieu where his­toric wars have left a trail of memo­ri­als and muni­tions, where internecine feuds con­tin­ue to be qui­et­ly waged, and where the Nation­al Front finds its tight-lipped majority.

Periph­er­al to the mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion, yet the cen­tral focus of the series and its title, is the pre-teen Quin­quin (Alane Del­haye) – all at once lit­tle ras­cal, altar boy, ten­der­ly inno­cent lover to girl-next-door Eve (Lucy Caron), and casu­al racist. Quin­quin is both inher­i­tor and embod­i­ment of France’s future, and his cleft lip, squashed nose and hear­ing aid are coun­ter­parts to Van der Weyden’s facial tics and limp, or to the men­tal dis­abil­i­ty of Quinquin’s Uncle Dany (Jason Cirot), whose spin­ning, cir­cu­lar ambles recall Carpentier’s dri­ving. They are sig­ni­fiers of broad­er imper­fec­tion in the French idyll.

Pre­sent­ed in its unedit­ed 200 min­utes, this is big-screen binge-watch­ing, and offers a mean­der­ing, ram­shackle por­trait of the state of a nation rather than the usu­al arc-and-res­o­lu­tion struc­ture expect­ed of a fea­ture film. Yet the series’ place in the cin­e­ma is ful­ly jus­ti­fied by Guil­laume Def­fontaines’ ​’Scope lens­ing, which main­tains a com­i­cal­ly panoram­ic dis­tance from all the pas­toral per­ver­si­ty on dis­play. The baroque body count is just a red her­ring, with France’s insu­lar­i­ty, chau­vin­ism and bad blood the real dev­il here. It’s a dark les­son in his­to­ry which, released in the wake of the Char­lie Heb­do mas­sacre, seems all too prescient.