CRITICAL – Dominik Moll masterfully stages a PJ investigation into femicide. A moving film.
Alone at night, Yohan pedals on the track of a velodrome, his head in the handlebars. He continues the tricks. This is the first image of The Night of the 12th . A perfect metaphor. A hellish and endless loop. Like the investigation into the assassination of Clara, a young girl doused in gasoline and burned alive by a hooded man as she returned home in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. She haunts this cop from the Grenoble judicial police.
Dominik Moll and his co-writer, Gilles Marchand, selected one story among others in Pauline Guéna’s book 18.3. A year at the PJ (Éditions Denoël), story of twelve months immersed in the Versailles police services. The Night of the 12th describes with realism and detail the life of a group united by overtime, PVs, marital setbacks and sordid crimes.
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Bastien Bouillon is perfect as a youthful and rigorous group leader, melancholic and silent. Bouli Lanners is the complete opposite and just as good. His Marceau is a generous and emotional cop, capable of reciting Verlaine’s Sentimental Colloquy and less and less able to keep his cool.
Fifty Shades of Misogyny
More than the printer problems, Clara’s death keeps Yohan and his men from sleeping. The victim’s exes make up the list of main suspects. A guy from the bowling alley where Clara worked, in a relationship and worried about seeing his gap revealed (“Clara, that wasn’t really my style”). A handsome guy from the climbing club (“Clara was a sex friend, she wasn’t complicated”).
A jealous guy from the city who thinks he’s a hardcore rapper and says on YouTube that he’s going to burn it (“Clara wasn’t a faithful girl”). A big mouth who punches his friends, met on Facebook (“Clara, she loved my animal side, we fucked hard”)… Fifty Shades of Misogyny. Each interrogation deprives the viewer a little more air. Tie the stomach. Tears the heart.
It’s nothing compared to the confrontation between Yohan and Clara’s best friend. The cop’s questions end up making her break down. ” What does it change ? It sounds like I’m talking about a whore. She got killed because she was a girl. That’s it that’s all. » The words “feminicide” or “toxic masculinity” are never uttered. Cops don’t talk like sociologists or psychologists. In this world, it is men who fight against the violence of other men.
And it is the women who open Yohan’s eyes. Notably the investigating judge, played superbly by Anouk Grinberg. It is in his office that Yohan splits the armor: “What drove me crazy was that all the guys we heard from could have done it. This is something wrong between men and women. » This something wrong, The Night of the 12th depicts it in a relentless manner. Without forcing the darkness of the line. The film could have been titled Elegy for Clara.
