[CINÉMA] The Maldoror file, a good fiction on the Dutroux affair

The criminal Marc Dutroux never ceases to be talked about. In 2020, a college of three psychiatrists was responsible for establishing, at the request of his lawyer Bruno Dayez, an expert report in order to prepare a parole – to which the person concerned can claim since 2013. Extremely unfavorable, Their conclusions left little doubt about the Dutroux possibilities to go out a prison day …

Today, it is through the cinema that the pedocrimonel redids the news, since the filmmaker Fabrice du Welz is released on the screens a police fiction freely inspired by this sordid affair that had shaken the Belgian society.

As a reminder, in August 1996, Marc Dutroux, his wife Michelle Martin and their accomplice Michel Lelièvre were charged with the kidnapping and sequestration of Laetitia Delhez and Sabine Dardenne, found shortly after in a cache in Marcinelle. Subsequently, four bodies of girls were found, as well as that of an accomplice, Bernard Weinstein. Very quickly, the Belgian authorities mentioned the track of a skillfully organized network, mixing both pedocrime and drug trafficking, in which Michel Nihoul, media personality close to business circles, would in particular. Journalist Karl Zero considers the latter as one of the thinking heads of a much larger criminal organization, which justice has never been able to prove …

A cathartic film

Drawing freely from the Dutroux affair for his film The Maldoror filewhich takes care to modify the names of the protagonists in order to better deliver a personal reading of the events, the director Fabrice du Welz intends to exorcise the Belgian company as a whole which, according to him, has never really recovered from all This horror. The opportunity, for the filmmaker, to return to the dysfunctions of the institutions, to point out the (guilty) absence of cooperation between police and gendarmerie – mentioned from the opening intertitors – and to offer the Belgian spectator a fantastical end where The evil is finally punished up to his crimes: ” I wanted to push my story to fiction, said the director, Until uchrony, to the fantasy of justice which we have been deprived of. »

On this specific point, the conclusion of the story, eyeing the “vigilant Movie”, in the manner ofA vigilante in the city or from Inspector Harrywill not fail to offend the right left consciences that will cry out for “reactionary” speech, “fascism” or “populism” … The whole question, from now on, is whether Fabrice du Welz is ready to make the blows or if he will go to bed like the filmmaker Cédric Jimenez who, having not assumed Northern tankhad apologized miserably after a week, in the press, of having been recovered by “the extreme right”. Bets are open.

The choice of restraint

In itself, if The Maldoror file (The reference to Lautréamont is wanted) is not the exhaustive film that we hoped for on the Dutroux affair, it is nonetheless a great success. Handicrasser worthy of David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac), the film proves to us that French -speaking cinema, since Next time I will target my heart (on Alain Lamare) and The SK1 affair (On Guy Georges), has much to envy his American models. Little touting, taking into account what the genre has been used to us, the filmmaker has the good taste of leaving the worst off-champ, soliciting the spectator's unconscious imagination, and concentrating not on the victims and Their families, nor on the killer, but on a young gendarme on edge, lively and intuitive, who underwent the lack of discernment and the inconsistency of his hierarchy. Always so talented, actor Anthony Bajon, who has come a long way since Prayerfrom Cédric Kahn, shows us once again that he knows how to choose his roles, sparingly and conscientiously.

4 out of 5 stars