La fille au bracelet
Stéphane Demoustier (2019)
The bracelet isn’t a piece of jewellery but an electronic tagging device on the ankle of seventeen-year-old Lise Bataille (Melissa Guers). She’s been charged with the murder of her best friend, Flora Dufour, and two years after the killing, is about to face trial. Most of Stéphane Demoustier’s tightly controlled drama takes place in a courtroom, a smaller number of scenes in and around the house in Nantes where Lise lives with her father Bruno (Roschdy Zem), mother Céline (Chiara Mastroianni) and younger brother Jules (Paul Aïssaoui-Cuvelier). The opening sequence, accompanied by the film’s titles, is on a beach close to the Batailles’ holiday home. Uniformed police officers approach the family. There’s a brief conversation. Lise puts some clothes over her bikini and departs with the two officers. The sequence is shot from some distance away. You can’t hear the conversation or see the expressions on the characters’ faces but Lise’s reaction isn’t obviously demonstrative. That’s a sign of things to come.
Lise pleads not guilty though the word ‘plead’ and this particular defendant hardly go together[1]. Her lack of affect is remarkable. Under examination in court, Lise seldom evinces more than impatience at a question put to her, and her face rarely cracks. Even the calm, determined defence counsel (Annie Mercier) occasionally seems exasperated by her client’s impassivity. Lise’s demeanour gives off a whiff of Lindy Chamberlain syndrome but goes beyond refusing to conform to expectations of how a grief-stricken female should behave in public. At home, Lise is routinely irritated by her (relatively) exuberant brother and sometimes irked by her father’s solicitude though never, in spite of her situation, to the point of a sustained outburst. When she guiltily tells her daughter she won’t be attending the trial because of work commitments, Céline Bataille pushes for an emotional reaction that she doesn’t get.
You naturally wonder if the accused’s stolid manner will prejudice the jury against her; it’s certainly something to which Anaïs Demoustier’s prosecution counsel, herself the most animated presence in the court, draws attention. From Stéphane Demoustier’s point of view, Lise’s seeming indifference is also a means of sustaining the mystery of Flora’s violent death. (She was found in her bed, stabbed seven times. The evidence against Lise, the last person known to have seen Flora alive, is purely circumstantial.) Like its title character, The Girl with a Bracelet has a distinctive, consistent tone – one that makes you suspect, from an early stage, that Demoustier won’t ‘solve’ the crime, and which heightens awareness of your own expectations of a crime/courtroom drama.
Those expectations never disappear. For example, one of a set of kitchen knives in the Batailles’ holiday cottage is missing. The prosecution contends that this knife was the murder weapon. It turns up when the family return to the cottage, on the mid-trial weekend, to clear the place out. You’re primed to think the find will be critically important, in further implicating Lise or even pointing to the involvement of another family member. The long lost knife does help Lise’s cause – but only because it’s established that it couldn’t, after all, have been used to kill Flora. We don’t find out any more about the weapon actually used, or who committed the murder.
Based on the 2018 Argentine film Acusada (The Accused), Demoustier’s screenplay may be deliberately short on dramatic events but is still somewhat dependent on them. After a couple of days of the trial, Lise’s mother decides to come to court, and takes the stand to testify on her daughter’s behalf. Before the jury retires to consider a verdict, taciturn Lise is asked if she has anything to add and, to everyone’s surprise, replies yes. She makes a tearful apology to Flora’s mother (Anne Paulicevich), for breaking off contact with her in the light of Flora’s death. Both changes of heart make for instantly compelling moments though neither seems particularly well motivated. Why would Mme Dufour want or expect the person accused of her daughter’s murder to stay in touch? In Céline’s case, the U-turn is more a matter of underlining the improbability of her not attending the trial in the first place. The jury finds Lise not guilty and she’s free to go. We don’t see her face as she removes the electronic bracelet and replaces it with a more conventional anklet – a too neat touch.
As can be guessed from the above, Demoustier doesn’t indulge in explanatory flashback – except in the form of two phone video recordings, played to the court. The first of these is crucial and particularly effective. The recording, by Flora, shows Lise giving a blowjob to Nathan (Mikaël Halimi), Flora’s boyfriend at the time (and an uncomfortable witness at the trial). This video matters in several ways. Flora shared it online, which caused a rift between the two longstanding friends; the prosecution suggests that Lise never forgave Flora and killed her in revenge. Bruno Bataille, more often stoically composed in court, can’t watch as his young daughter’s sex life becomes a matter of public record. The video is evidence of what Lise and Flora would do for a laugh – and Lise is indeed laughing. She is too in the second clip, which shows her and Flora (Émilie Lehuraux) dancing at a party the night before the murder. The Lise of these videos is unrecognisable from the unsmiling, oddly detached figure she’s become. It makes you wonder how much her parents (and even her little brother) have also changed in the long interval between her arrest and trial – a period of limbo for the family but, for Bruno and Céline, a time too of recurring fears that their daughter might be guilty. Stéphane Demoustier does a skilful job of conveying the emotionally erosive effects of the allegations made against Lise on her and those close to her.
Measured, limited but absorbing, The Girl with a Bracelet is well acted throughout. The cast includes some high-profile players: in the latest César awards, Roschdy Zem and Anaïs Demoustier (the director’s sister) were named Best Actor and Best Actress for performances in other films in the same year as this one[2]. Zem and Chiara Mastroianni (who was also César-nominated this year[3]) do particularly good work as Lise’s parents. As Jules, Paul Aïssaoui-Cuvelier is a credible mixture of sparky inquisitiveness and suppressed anxiety. Like him, Melissa Guers is (according to IMDb) making her screen acting debut here. In order for the film to work at all, the actress playing Lise must be willing to be dislikable. Guers commits to this fearlessly and with fine control.
27 June 2020
[1] For simplicity’s sake, I’m using English court terms despite the many evident differences in the French legal system. For example, the trial features two prosecution barristers – an avocat des parties civiles (Carlo Ferrante) and an avocat général (Anaïs Demoustier). The former’s role seems to be virtually administrative; the latter does most of the prosecuting. The proceedings are chaired by a president du tribunal (Pascal Garbarini), one of several judges. There seem to be six jury members.
[2] Roschdy Zem won for Roubaix, une lumière and Anaïs Demoustier for Alice et le maire.
[3] For Chambre 212.
