Film review

  • The Night of the 12th

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La nuit du 12

    Dominik Moll (2022)

    Policemen are looking younger even on screen … The Night of the 12th starts with a leaving do for the retiring head of a criminal investigation unit in Grenoble.  Tourancheau (Nicolas Jouhet) is grey-haired, probably in his fifties.  His successor as capitaine, Yohan Vivès, seems about twenty; Bastien Bouillon, who plays him, was actually a boyish thirty-six at the time.  The retirement party takes place on the evening of 12th October 2016.  A few hours later, in a nearby mountain village, a young woman called Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier) says goodnight to her best friend, Stéphanie (‘Nanie’) Béguin (Pauline Serieys), and heads home to her parents.  She’s soon confronted by a male figure, wearing a hood and perhaps a mask (hard to tell in the darkness).  He throws petrol over Clara and gets out a lighter.  The young woman, her upper body on fire, tries to flee her attacker and runs a little way before collapsing.  Her corpse is discovered next morning.  Vivès has his first murder case as the man in charge.

    On-screen text at the start of Dominik Moll’s latest film notes that around eight hundred murders are committed in France each year and that this is the story of just one.  A legend preceding the closing credits confirms we’ve been watching ‘a fictional film based on real events’.  Moll’s screenplay, which he wrote with Gilles Marchand, is based (how closely or otherwise I don’t know) on a case recounted in a 2020 non-fiction work, 18.3 – une année à la PJ, by Pauline Guéna.  According to Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Guéna ‘was embedded for a year with France’s Police Judiciaire (equivalent to the UK’s CID)’, whose operation is enshrined in the French penal code, section 18.3.  The Night of the 12th, in keeping with its reportage source material, is a tightly focused police procedural – until it develops into something rather different.

    Moll – whose previous film was the fascinating Only the Animals (2019), also co-written with Marchand – works in some striking, credible details from the start.  The attitude of most of the detectives to Clara’s death is beyond businesslike; one team member is more emotional about the office photocopier on the blink than he is about the murder victim. A few men in the unit (there are no women) aren’t above occasional tasteless graveyard humour but Yohan isn’t among them.  Preparing to break the bad news to Mme Royer (Charline Paul), he dries for several seconds – long enough to make a terrible situation worse and elicit a furious, frantic reaction from Clara’s incredulous mother.  Yohan later explains to a colleague, Marceau (Bouli Lanners), that, just as he was about to speak, he caught sight of a framed photograph of Clara as a girl, holding her cat.  The colleague understands how the child-and-cat got Yohan’s tongue:  Marceau reckons it’s not as hard to cope with a corpse as with reminders of who the corpse once was.

    Sharing a confidence isn’t like Yohan, who’s laconic to a fault:  communication skills evidently weren’t high on the selection criteria for the capitaine job.  When the men in the unit are having a quick bite to eat, discussing work and play, Yohan is there but observing rather than engaging in conversation.  Although his freeze with Clara’s mother is a one-off, his habitually halting speech and tense manner mean that he disconcerts without trying other people interviewed in connection with the murder.  Yohan lives not just alone but, it seems, in complete social isolation.  His idea of relaxation outside work is doing cycle laps round a deserted velodrome.  Marceau is his polar opposite.  As Tourancheau chokes up during his farewell speech, his colleagues urge Yohan to say a few words instead.  A few words are exactly what he comes out with:  it’s Marceau, closer in age to the outgoing boss, who has to take over the talking.  There’s more to come.  Marceau reveals to Yohan that his marriage is on the skids:  he and his wife have for years been trying for a baby; she has recently started an affair with another man by whom she’s already pregnant.  Yohan takes pity on Marceau and invites him to stay in his flat for the time being – a surprising arrangement since these two make the title characters in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple look like domestic soulmates.  Deploring the state of the PJ office toilets, fastidious Yohan stipulates that, in his apartment, Marceau will pee sitting down rather than taking aim.

    It’s a convention of detective films and television of course that the main cops’ personal lives play a part in the story along with crime-solving.  Dominik Moll exploits that convention, as a means of letting us think we’re watching a typical policier.  (Yohan’s velodrome routine is another means:  a variation – the literally going-round-in-circles gives it a nice spin – on the familiar screen sight of a criminal investigator who’s also an obsessive jogger.)  In leading us to expect The Night of the 12th’s resolution to link to the personalities of Yohan and Marceau, Moll is much assisted by his contrasting main actors.  Bastien Bouillon (who had a small role in Only the Animals) somehow manages to make the unremarkable-looking Yohan magnetically earnest.  Bouli Lanners, as Marceau, is more traditionally charismatic but has real warmth as well as theatrical zest.

    Using detective-fiction tropes to give us our bearings turns out, however, to be Moll’s way of pulling the rug from under our feet.  The Night of the 12th has won numerous awards in France, among them six Césars, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay[1].   For as long as it behaves as an essentially straightforward mystery thriller, I couldn’t understand why it had been so honoured:  the story is compelling and well told without being particularly complex, imaginative or having an obvious awards-bait hook.  But the reason for the laurels – the reason this is considered by the French film industry a picture-to-be-proud-of – emerges in due course.  At the same time, The Night of the 12th becomes unsatisfying as the type of film it had seemed to be.

    The investigators soon learn that Clara had numerous short-lived relationships with men.  The implications of this are explored in vociferous debate within Yohan’s team and in the last of his interviews with Clara’s friend Nanie.  The latter is a very effective scene, thanks chiefly to Pauline Serieys’s strongly felt expression of Nanie’s distress:  her friend, she says, always chose lousy men; because there were plenty of them, Clara’s now regarded as ‘a slut’, who had it coming.  Some of the cops come very close to saying as much.  One decides the murderer must be a ‘psycho’ because of how he killed:  according to this PJ officer, it can be understandable that a man impulsively stabs or strangles a woman to death but premeditated immolation is something else.  (This shocking analysis, it should be said, is disputed by his colleagues.)  Clara’s sexual partners are interviewed in turn; all of them are, to varying degrees, dislikeable.  They include, among others, Gabi Lacazette (Nathanaël Beausivoir), who, when he and Clara fell out, wrote a song threatening to torch her and posted it on YouTube; and creepy Denis Douet (Benjamin Blanchy), who sends the police an envelope containing a cigarette lighter that he claims is the murder weapon.  The nastiest of the lot is Vincent Caron (Pierre Lottin), a serial abuser of women, but his current girlfriend, Nathalie (Camille Rutherford), gives him an alibi for the night of the twelfth.  The fact that Nathalie is also the name of his adulterous wife sends Marceau over the edge.  He beats up Caron and, when Yohan tries to intervene, knocks him to the ground, too.  This is the last seen of Marceau.

    Dominik Moll now abruptly moves the action forward three years and his film changes tack, also with a jolt.  Two important female characters are introduced.  The first is a recently appointed ‘investigating judge’[2] for the area (Anouk Grinberg).  The case has been closed with Clara’s murder unsolved but the judge, meeting with Yohan, requests that it be reopened.  The second new character is Nadia (Mouna Soualem), who has joined Yohan’s team (seemingly in place of Marceau) and is quickly presented as more competent than all the other male detectives put together.  In his meeting with the judge, Yohan regrets that lack of evidence prevented a murder charge being brought against any of Clara’s ex-partners.  He then launches into uncharacteristic rhetoric along the lines that any man could be the killer because what men do to women means that all men are guilty.

    Yohan eagerly resumes the investigation, working closely with Nadia:  he gets on more easily with her than with his male colleagues.  The judge has suggested the impending third anniversary of Clara’s death could see her killer return to the scene of the crime; Yohan and Nadia spend the night of 12th October 2019 on a stakeout there.  The only visitors to the spot are Clara’s parents (Matthieu Rozé plays her father), who stand quietly for a minute to remember their daughter, but in the cemetery where she’s buried a camera hidden in the gravestone next to hers yields more promising overnight footage.  A young man (David Murgia), not previously seen in the film, arrives at Clara’s grave, virtually prostrates himself and then appears to sing.  Online research and analysis of the footage reveal that he’s called Mats and is singing ‘Angel of the Night’, a 1983 song by the Toxic Ivies, which also features on Mats’s web page[3].  The PJ detectives are sure they have their man but lots of viewers will be asking (as this one did):  how do they know Mats isn’t an innocent saddo fixated on a presumably well-publicised murder?  This is what he turns out to be:  it transpires that in October 2016 Mats was a patient in a mental hospital.

    When he lurches into expansiveness in her office Yohan also tells the judge that every detective is haunted by a particular case.  She asks if Clara’s case is the one that haunts him and he doesn’t disagree.  If premature certainty of Mats’s guilt were down to Yohan’s obsession with finding the killer, this part of the plot might be more plausible.  What’s puzzling is that newcomer Nadia is even more convinced than he is:  the emergence of Mats’s alibi prompts her to apologise to Yohan for being ‘sure we’d struck gold’.  Once Mats is ruled out the renewed investigation is over, at least for the film’s audience – yet it seems we’re not meant to find this anti-climactic.  The Night of the 12th might seem to echo Moll’s Only the Animals.  That film also concerned a woman’s murder; as the narrative moved forward, the whodunit aspect was somewhat upstaged.  But that’s as far are the similarities go.  In Only the Animals, the killer’s identity was revealed; this eventually seemed of almost secondary importance only because the emerging dramatic structure was ingenious and the developing relationships between characters were so intriguing.  In The Night of the 12th, however, it’s the nailing of pandemic misogyny – so baldly confirmed in Yohan’s words to the judge – that’s supposed to eclipse the question of who killed Clara Royer.

    Some may think the film, in progressing to this point of view, rises above the level of conventional crime thriller but the shift doesn’t make sense in the context of the story.  At the end of The Night of the 12th, Yohan, still in correspondence with Marceau, writes to tell his old colleague that he’s taken his advice to get out of that god-forsaken velodrome and up into the mountains:  Moll’s closing shot shows Yohan cycling in an alpine landscape, nearly smiling.  He’s seen the light in a broader sense, too, but surely he was the one man who didn’t need to: as one of his macho underlings sarcastically complains in an earlier scene, when Yohan tells him off for chauvinist remarks, ‘it’s all right for you – you’re perfect’.  Since there’s no suggestion that the other male cops have now got their priorities right, it’s not clear what Yohan has got to celebrate – or why Clara’s case no longer haunts him.  Dominik Moll seems finally to be saying that we need to solve, rather than individual crimes, the underlying problem of male violence towards women.  We can only assume his protagonist agrees – a not entirely reassuring mindset for a professional detective.  You leave the film as you began it, thinking, though now for different reasons, that Yohan Vivès is a surprising choice to lead a team in the police judiciaire.

    19 June 2023

    [1] The three other Césars were for Most Promising Actor (Bouillon), Best Supporting Actor (Lanners) and Best Sound.  The film also won the Magritte award (Belgium’s equivalent of the César) for Best Foreign Film in Coproduction.

    [2] In the French legal system, each investigating judge (juge d’instruction) is ‘appointed by the president of France upon the recommendation of the Ministry of Justice and serves renewable three-year terms. …  An investigating judge initiates an investigation upon an order of the Public Prosecutor (procureur) or upon the request of a private citizen’ (Wikipedia).

    [3] ‘Angel of the Night’ was actually composed by Olivier Marguerit, who wrote the music for The Night of the 12th.   The Toxic Ivies are presumably an invention.

  • Master Gardener

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Schrader (2022)

    Master Gardener completes Paul Schrader’s so-called ‘man in a room’ trilogy, following First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021).  I’ve not caught up with the latter but this new film is a sizeable disappointment after First Reformed.  Schrader made his cinematic name writing about another man in a room – about what happens when Travis Bickle, increasingly obsessive and unhinged, emerges from his room and the yellow cab he drives, and tries to impose himself on New York City and right its wrongs.  Like Travis in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and the Reverend Ernst Toller in First Reformed, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), the protagonist and title character of Master Gardener, keeps a diary-cum-journal but his jottings, compared with those of his screen predecessors, tend to the pretentious.  Travis Bickle was too desperate for that; Ernst Toller was conscious of writing in a confessional tradition that, to some extent, went with his job.  But when Narvel commits to paper gobbets of horticultural philosophy – gardening is ‘a belief in the future … an act of faith’, a matter of bringing order out of disorder, and so on – he’s expressing clichéd thoughts that soon feel like padding.  What’s more, the thoughts (spoken by Joel Edgerton in voiceover) have the ring of ventriloquism – of Schrader using Narvel as a metaphorical mouthpiece.  There’s a bigger problem with Master Gardener, though.  To make any kind of sense, it needed to focus less on the man in the room than on the young woman joining him there and discovering who he really is – or used to be.

    Narvel has worked for some years as horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens, the home of wealthy, widowed, childless Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver).  The story appears to be set in the present day but the place’s name has a salvationary flavour and the Haverhill mansion the look of a former plantation house.  (The film was shot on various locations in Louisiana.)  It’s clear from an early conversation between them that Narvel’s employer is a racist bigot.  A familial obligation of sorts impels her instruction that Narvel take on her grand-niece, Maya, as an apprentice gardener but she’s evidently pained to inform him that her relative is mixed-race: thanks to Maya’s father’s ethnicity,  Mrs Haverhill considered her single-parent mother, who has recently died, a doubly fallen woman.  Within a few more screen minutes, it’s clear also that the master gardener was once a white supremacist.  He became Narvel Roth when he entered witness protection, after refusing to kill a Black preacher’s wife and daughter, and betraying vicious comrades.

    Narvel bears physical proofs of his past.  He’s covered in tattoos – slogans, swastikas, a skull as a chest centrepiece.  The first scene that exposes his upper body takes place in Mrs Haverhill’s bedroom, thereby revealing too that she’s aware of Narvel’s former identity and uses him for more than his green fingers.  The arrival of Maya (Quintessa Swindell) triggers not only racial tension but also sexual jealousy on her great-aunt’s part, even before the young woman and Narvel have grown close.  The newcomer, although an unwilling pupil, has a warmer welcome from other members of the gardening team (Victoria Hill, Amy Le, Eduardo Losan) – none of whom knows about Narvel’s earlier life.  Maya travels daily to Gracewood Gardens from the housing project where she still lives.  She’s drugs-dependent, with a dealer, RG (Jared Bankens), who metes out violence as well as supplying narcotics.  After Maya turns up one day with a facial injury, Narvel approaches Oscar Neruda (Esai Morales), his caseworker within the witness protection programme, asking him to intimidate RG.  That surprising request heralds plenty more snags in Schrader’s plotting.  His screenplay here is much less carefully worked through than it was in First Reformed.  For example, in the early stages of Master Gardener Narvel et al are preparing the gardens for an annual charity event that, for them and for Mrs Haverhill, is a highlight of their year.  It looks set to correspond to the anniversary celebrations of the consecration of Ernst Toller’s church in First Reformed but Schrader more or less abandons the charity event once it becomes a narrative obstacle.

    Master Gardener majors in recurrent Paul Schrader preoccupations – regret, redemption, vigilantism.  He knows it; he knows that we (that is, viewers reasonably familiar with his work) know it too.  There are moments in this new film when Schrader exploits audience expectations in order to subvert them.  When Mrs Haverhill wrongly assumes that Narvel and Maya are already having an affair, she fires them immediately and they go on the road together.  Receiving word that RG and his sidekick, Sissy (Matt Mercurio), have, in his absence, vandalised Mrs Haverhill’s gardens (this conveniently puts the tin hat on preparations for the charity event), Narvel returns to Gracewood to collect a gun.  He then drives with Maya to the housing project but the Taxi Driver-like bloodbath that we anticipate doesn’t materialise (although the terrorised RG and Sissy do get their legs broken).

    Schrader’s no doubt also aware that plenty of what happens in Master Gardener strains credibility.  His justification for this is presumably that he’s interested not in realistic possibility but with the possibility of redemptive transformation and renewal.  Yet the particular race-based scenario he uses to illustrate and dramatise that possibility carries with it, I think, a responsibility to address Maya’s, as well as Narvel’s, feelings about their relationship – a responsibility that Schrader largely ignores.  That both is a moral evasion and severely limits as drama the story he tells.  In their motel room Narvel, thinking that Maya is asleep, takes off his shirt to write his journal. There’s no good reason for him to drop his guard in this way except, of course, for Maya to wake and see his tattoos.  She’s appalled but Narvel insists that he has changed and they have sex for the first time.  That same night, Maya tells Narvel he must get rid of the tattoos.  Schrader appears to think – though it’s hard to believe he really does – that this snatch of dialogue is enough to put to bed (no other phrase for it) the very difficult issue at the heart of the plot:  a young woman of colour enters into a sexual relationship with a man whose body proclaims his hatred of non-white bodies.

    Narvel doesn’t, despite Maya’s request, have the tattoos removed.  He may well regard them as multiple marks of Cain that must always remain part of him but what does Maya think about that?   This doesn’t matter to Schrader because Maya is a means of interrupting Narvel’s determined solitariness, virtually the instrument of his eventual salvation but not an independent character.  In the final showdown between them, Narvel tells the vanquished Mrs Haverhill that he and Maya are getting married.  Mrs Haverhill brands the match ‘obscene’; Narvel replies that he knows from personal experience what true obscenity is.  Although it would be going too far to say that’s more than can be said for Narvel’s creator, Schrader’s neglect of Maya’s point of view verges on repugnant.

    Master Gardener is, in mood and appearance, disappointingly monotone.  DP Alexander Dynan’s images are mostly drained of colour.  (The rare exceptions are a few of Mrs Haverhill’s outfits, a sunshine-yellow dress that Maya wears for a lunch with her great-aunt, and shocking-pink, computer-generated flowers blooming luminous on the roadside during a brief, ecstatic night-time car journey made by Narvel and Maya.)  The scrupulously glum palette doesn’t succeed in being emotionally oppressive:  it just seems to draw attention to itself.  The same goes for Schrader’s overuse of Devonté Hynes’s mournful music.  Joel Edgerton’s performance is formidably disciplined but (for me, as usual with this actor) insufficiently expressive.  Edgerton’s grim presence does, though, give Mrs Haverhill’s nickname for Narvel – ‘sweet pea’ – an added ironic kick.  Sigourney Weaver’s playing is deliberate but casting her in the battleaxe role is effective in physical terms.  Now in her early seventies, Weaver is still beautiful – which gives Mrs Haverhill’s envy of Maya’s youthful good looks, mixed with rancid loathing of her skin colour, a stronger charge.  Quintessa Swindell does what she can with her deplorably underwritten role.

    1 June 2023

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