Polisse
Directed by: Maïwenn
With: Karin Viard, Joey Starr, Marina Foïs, Emmanuelle Bercot, Nicholas Duvauchelle, Karol Rocher, Frédéric Pierrot.
Every line in Polisse is a blow and a blessing.
Based on director Maïwenn Le Besco’s real experience with the Child Protection Unit in Paris, Polisse follows the work of a close group of policemen as they travel through child prostitution, paedophilia, teen gang rape and blitz operations. The facts are partly observed through the lenses of photographer Melissa Zaia (interpreted by Maïwenn herself), who – thanks to her husband Francesco’s (Riccardo Scamarcio) connections – is allowed to spend time with the Unit in order to document their work. Against the backdrop of the Unit’s shocking routine dealing with crimes and abuses, we catch glimpses of the policemen and women’s private lives: Nadine’s (Karin Viard) painful divorce, Iris’s (Marina Foïs) bulimia and hinted troubled past, Fred’s (Joey Starr) broken relationship with his wife, Mathieu (Nicholas Duvauchelle) and Chrys’ (Karole Rocher) unspoken love. What we are left with is a precarious balance of personal feelings and public duty, bewildering confessions and unspoken wounds, sexual perversions and sexual abuses.
The film opens with a striking sequence in which the tough and inhibited language of police interrogation merges with the vivid, prickly familiar tone of dialogue between the men and women of the Unit. We see Baloo (Frédéric Pierrot) asking a grandfather who abused his granddaughter of how his ‘zizi’ got out of control and then we hear Iris and Nadine conversing at lunch about ‘bite’ and cheating. Much of the spell and power of the movie is in its frank, colloquial, street language which strips the most perverse sexual abuses of their taboos, delivering their raw essence. Baloo at one moment says, speaking for the whole film: I say it like this because it is like this. This mix of aggressiveness and irony, slang and authoritative questioning fits the French language perfectly so that one wonders if much of the movie’s spell is lost when the dialogue is translated into English.
Matching the dialogue’s spontaneous force is the acting which appears as surprisingly vivid and life-like, verging at times on the documentaristic. The experience is immersive. The teasing jokes, fiery arguments and contagious laughs which are thrown and triggered among the group have the freshness and familiarity of a real life improvisation and seem to evade any scripted dialogue. Even the love story between Melissa and Fred – the most ‘movie-like’ and perhaps unnecessary thread in the movie – is kept low-key and sober. The whole movie is so poignant in its unpretentious tone that its tragic end seems to add little more to its powerful message: disguised in the quotidian, dramas happen everyday without making sensational headlines on newspapers.
The title, ‘polisse’, is a (childish) misspelled word for ‘police’. But is the movie’s portrait of the Unit accurate? One would have to trust Maiwenn’s lived experience among the Unit. What is certain, however, is that Polisse is not an all-round flattering picture. We see the police having a good group laugh in front of a ‘badly behaved’ girl or using petty recrimination against each other as in the magisterial fight between Nadine and Iris. The head of the police Beauchard (Wladimir Yordanoff) seems to be motivated more by prestige and useful friendships, rather than moral duty. Those we see are not heroes. It is a police force that struggles to separate the personal from the professional, that does not score but minor and temporary victories, that has to dig and face what society silently hides.
Maybe Polisse won’t change the image people have of the police. But it will uncover the evil existing on the other side, on ‘our’ side.
fiamma
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