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#02 POLICEMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
02/09/2005
While Xavier Beauvois 's fourth feature can be defined as a very nicely executed film noir depicting a young lieutenant's first steps in the criminal section of a Parisian central police department, its subtlety evades the rules of the genre. It focuses neither on crimes nor on criminals, to start with, but on the daily life of the police, seen as ordinary people with families or drinking problems. However, the director plays with the potential excitement of crime, the vicinity of events which would be much more cinematic and which these police somehow wish they had to deal with more often —as show the many film posters (Seven, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly...) blue-tacked on their walls.
Thus, the real subject of the film is not really the investigation on the petty murder of a beggar by two Russian ho-bos, but on the gap there is between these police officer's duty to embody 'righteous behaviour' and their personal weaknesses. The captain (played by Nathalie Baye) is particularly representative of this borderline personality motif, for she is at the same time a great professional and an AA. Even the young lieutenant, her protégé, a well-behaved provincial newly-wed, cannot help feeling the (dangerous) thrill of carrying weapons and fighting against crime. The camera, by lingering silently (for there is no music to disturb the director's psychological insights) on the characters' faces, conveys the impression that they are always walking on thin ice, struggling to contain the human emotions which lie beneath the surface.
The beauty and the truthfulness of this movie lies in its very simplicity. The director lays a perceptive eye on reality but never mediates it.
Do you define Le petit lieutenant as a film noir? If so, what are your influences?
My wife does not agree with me but I do describe my film as a noir. In fact, I felt like working on this particular genre from a new perspective by focusing not on misfits but on the police, for a change. So I studied their daily life at the police department. Thus, even if my film belongs to a genre, I cannot say I was directly influenced by other films, and certainly not by TV fictions which I find boring after five minutes. I just filmed what I saw. That is actually part of my morals as a director. In this respect, I really admire Pialat, Rosselini, or even Cassavetes. I do not want to lie to my public, even if it makes the movie prettier. My film could almost be a documentary: the first scene is a real graduation ceremony where I managed to infiltrate my actor, twenty police officers are non-professional actors playing their own role, and the homeless are real too. Thus, Le petit lieutenant is more of a documentary than anything I have ever seen on the same subject. The police is seldom dealt with and when it is, many images are voluntarily blurred.
The characters always seem to be in borderline states. How did you direct your actors to make their faces and silences so eloquent?
There is a difference between a comedian and a real actor. The former plays the character, the latter 'becomes' the character. In order to avoid to have my characters 'play', I asked them not to learn the text. They read it in the morning and we rehearsed only a couple of times. Sometimes, I filmed and pretented it was a 'filmed rehearsal' so they would not be stressed and lose the freshness of their emotions.
Are you a cinephile?
I cannot say that I go to the cinema very often, just for the sake of going, but there are some authors I love and whose films I go and see without the shadow of a doubt.
Bénédicte Prot
www.cineuropa.org
In the photogallery, pictures by Michele Lamanna
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