Julie, Melissa, An, Eefje, Sabine, Lætitia. This sad litany of first names forms a deep scar in the psyche of the country. We are also entitled to wonder if the wound of the trauma caused by the Dutroux affair is really healed or if the pain is only anesthetized by the passage of time.
This pain also hides the anger born from the fiasco of justice which, more than once, has gone off the rails in this case, to the point of putting the question of the death penalty and that of the incompressibility of sentences.
In total empathy with the parents of the victims, the Belgians will soon be able to measure the effect of the years spent trying to understand what happened with the release – on October 23 – of Fabrice Du Welz’s film, Feeling sickinspired by the Dutroux affair. The Belgian director (twenty years old at the time of the events) therefore tackled this delicate exercise of transforming a sordid episode of our contemporary history into a pure cinema object. In an interview given to our colleague Pascale Bourgaux on TV5 Monde, paraphrasing what many think, Fabrice Du Welz states: “Justice was not done to the extent of the case. This story is not a news item”.
This justice, criticized, forced to reform, is at the center of Dutroux, a free mana docu-fiction produced by RTL which imagines the conditional release of the man sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004, after a historic trial.
Twenty years after this verdict, with the different stages of the release of the kingdom’s most famous prisoner as a common thread (announcement, installation in a monastery, change of appearance, etc.), the RTL film focuses mainly on the legal concept reintegration and the possibility of applying it to Marc Dutroux who, as the speakers repeat, is not an inmate like the others. Formulated by his lawyer Bruno Dayez, key interlocutor in the documentary, all his requests for conditional release have so far been rejected…
In the film, the discussion around social reintegration (which Michel Lelièvre and Michelle Martin were able to enjoy) is organized by giving the floor to leading actors – Gino Russo and Jean-Denis Lejeune, fathers of Melissa and Julie; Chistian Panier, the former judge who welcomed Michelle Martin into one of his homes; Samuel Leistedt, psychiatrist in charge of Marc Dutroux; but also to observers like Philippe Morandini, press magistrate during the trial and Dominique Demoulin, journalist at the RTL editorial team who knows the case like the back of his hand.
Didactic (especially in its second part) and without fuss, the documentary poses the ethical question of “adjustable” justice depending on the profile of the condemned, but also that, more taboo, of the possible release from prison of Dutroux and its framing, weighing our own moral capacity to react to the incarnation of evil.
Broadcast on October 8 at 9:05 p.m. on France 2
Related News :