Maïwenn (2011)
It’s very clear very soon what Polisse is going to be like – hyperactive and hollow. Maïwenn delivers what’s meant to be a stunning finale – it’s certainly stunningly cheap – by cross-cutting between a boy gymnast vaulting to victory in a school competition and Iris, one of the members of the Paris police child protection unit whose activities are the subject of the film, leaping to her slow- motion suicide from a high window, in front of her colleagues. We’ve clocked Iris, a super-tense, unsmiling bulimic, as one to watch from an early stage. The young gymnast enters the story much later, a fearful victim of sexual abuse (by his gym teacher). The climax spells out crassly how the CPU help rescue children’s lives but, so pressured and stressful is the work they do, they put their own at risk. When Iris dies, the screen goes dark. The film is over and it has to be. There’s no way that the responses of the actors playing the other CPU team members could do justice to her shock exit – especially since they’ve been going over the top, even in reacting to much less, throughout the picture.
There are well-known people in the cast, including actors like Nicolas Duvauchelle and Frédéric Pierrot whom you know to be good from their other recent work (even in films as bad as this one). Duvauchelle is such a naturally nuanced performer that he comes out of Polisse relatively well but Pierrot, who’s been charming as less assertive characters (he was one of the few good things in both Let’s Talk About the Rain and I’ve Loved You So Long), is pumped up and shouty from the start as the CPU team leader Baloo. He remains watchable only because of the goodwill he has in reserve from previous roles. The two main actresses – Marina Fois (Iris) and Karen Viard as her furious rival Nadine – overplay in different styles. Fois is excessively controlled; Viard is relentlessly high-pitched. Everything she does is hideously overdone: she works her face far too much in, for example, the interviews that Nadine conducts with children. Perhaps the worst thing about Maïwenn’s direction of the cast is that it draws attention to how different her own playing is. As Melissa, a photographer who joins the unit, Maïwenn is all teeth and smiles. She’s intensely aware of her own camera but she rarely raises her voice. You can tell the impact her difference is meant to have in one of the few emotionally affecting sequences in Polisse: a homeless African woman brings her son in and asks the team to give the boy at least a roof over his head. When his mother leaves, the boy’s screams are terrible to hear. The sympathetic Fred (Joeystarr), who’s just become Melissa’s lover, cradles the boy in his arms and gradually calms him down. But it’s only when the tenderly silent Melissa-Maïwenn intervenes that the child is properly pacified.
It’s plain to see that Maïwenn is encouraging the supercharged playing – it’s meant to have galvanic rhythm but it’s mechanical and monotonous. When they’re interviewing a suspected paedophile, the men and women of the CPU are angrily and invariably censorious. Except when an interviewee is unarguably rebarbative (like Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, as a well-connected and insufferably complacent abuser), you get hardly any sense that a particular individual might strike the team as more or less sympathetic. All the home lives of the principal characters are riven with marital or other tensions and nothing that the team does, even when they’re having a good time, is less than manic – a game of charades, birthday drinks, a visit to a dance club to ‘celebrate’ when news come through that a critically injured baby is going to pull through. We get the point: these people work hard and play hard – their gruelling jobs mess up family relationships and give a desperate, aggressive edge to moments of relaxation. Maïwenn did lots of different things on the movie but her approach is consistently crude. The photography (Pierre Aim) and editing (Laure Gardette) have the same forced dynamism. There’s no freedom in the hand-held camera movements. Like the acting, it seems to be imitating documentary technique rather than conveying any kind of reality. The screenplay, which Maiwenn co-wrote with Emmanuelle Bercot (also in the cast), supplies lots of melodramatic incident but nothing underneath.
The CPU outfit is generously staffed – you notice it when several cars come screeching at once to a crime scene, when the team socialise together, when they’re pretending to be members of the public before pulling their weapons to make a multiple arrest. (Referring to themselves as ‘extras’ in this sequence underlines the point.). As Sally said, nearly all the children are pretty; the daughters of the Melissa character wear braces on their teeth but the braces look like a design feature. It takes nerve to make a movie focused on paedophilia and to see to it that all the minors on screen are good-looking but lack of nerve is one thing of which Maïwenn can’t be accused. At the start of the film, a legend announces that what we’re about to see is based on real-life cases. Nearly everything in Polisse has the ring of falsity.
17 June 2012