On the night of October 12, 2016, in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (Savoie), a 21-year-old young woman, Clara, was burned alive by a hooded man, as she was returning from an evening with friends. A brigade of the Grenoble judicial police is dispatched to the scene.
It was a real news item that inspired Dominik Moll to make his seventh feature film. Its formal power, its quality of writing, the intelligence of the cast join those of his first films, Harry, a friend who wishes you well (2000) and Lemming (2005), and earned, on Friday February 24, the director and its two actors (Bastien Bouillon and Bouli Lanners) to be rewarded at the Césars.
We know from the outset that the enigma will not be solved – an intertitle revealed it to us from the start of the film, thus warning us that the attention will have to be focused elsewhere. The film highlights the life of a brigade faced with lack of means, loneliness, frustration and the idea that the culprit may never be identified. A meticulous and obsessive work from which, in the same way, the film leads its subject. Which concerns men, and more specifically their relationship to women. These questions haunt the film. They determine its darkness and gravity.
great accuracy
The filmmaker has created a solid and very accurate score. A favor for the actors who, even in the smallest roles, find a way to express their singularity: the men of the brigade, their leader Yohan (Bastien Bouillon) and his old teammate Marceau (Bouli Lanners), Clara’s parents , her best friend Nanie (Pauline Serieys), her ex-boyfriends. Everyone brings their grain of salt to the discussion.
It is said that at the PJ each investigator comes across a crime that devours him one day. For Yohan, it is the murder of Clara, absent from the film, whose portrait emerges through the people who knew her. Over the testimonies, it appears that the victim fell in love easily, often with “bad boys”, leaving as it settled in people’s minds that she could “have looked for him”.
The little music, slyly, settles in. Before Nanie explodes her, in a flood of tears and anger, during a magnificent one-on-one with Yohan, at the end of which the thing is finally said: if Clara was killed, it is first because she was a girl, not because she slept, or not, with boys.
Three years later, faced with a new investigating judge (Anouk Grinberg) who decides to relaunch the investigation, Yohan, inhabited by a pain that does not go away, says his “conviction that if we do not find the assassin, it’s because it’s all the men who killed Clara. It’s something that’s wrong between men and women.” It is this “something that is wrong” that Dominik Moll questions, in the hollow of this deep valley, each space of which he cuts into tight shots and precise frames, as if to keep the madness of men in check.
