Perverse.

Time was a movie was a story that you saw in a theater for around ninety minutes, made in or for Hollywood with a couple of recognisable stars speaking English. After more than a century, this basic film form has gone away or at least taken refuge on a streaming site - Clint Eastwood and Cry Macho.  It’s become quite a change of pace to watch a new theatrical release. I did two and both turned out to be attacks  on the traditional feature form.

Dominik (Seules les bêtes / Only The Animals) Moll’s new La nuit du 12 / The Night of the 12th. though it has familiar crime movie ingredients - a (grisly) murder followed by a police investigation, forensic examination, interrogation of suspects & disturbing revelations - aims at something more than the grown up variation on the cop movie that it appears to be. As it progresses, it becomes clear that we are  not watching even something like the apparently similar Arnaud Desplechin Roubaix, une lumière / Oh Mercy!

Capt. Bastien Bouillon’s police judiciaire move in, out ranking the small town Grenoble gendarmes, to investigate the night time burning alive of young Lula Cotton-Frapier. Catching sight of her photo with a kitten halts Bouillon in the middle of telling her parents about her death. Examining the girl’s phone and talking with friend Pauline Serieys, to whom she made her last call from the park where she died, leads to stories of promiscuity and sexual violence and tracking down old flames, several of whom end shackled in the interrogation room.

The Squad have problems of their own. They can’t keep the toilet clean and their printer keeps on breaking down. Roughing up suspects doesn’t present the expected outcomes. Bouillon works out his issues cycling on the velodrome track, like a hamster wheel as veteran Bouli Lanners, the film’s most familiar face, prompts and Lanners is sleeping on the lunch room couch after a marital break up.  Their investigations only produce shadowy figures. 

Three years later Judge Anouk Grinberg  (Bertrand Blier’s 1997 Mon homme and still looking good) digs the case out of the file-covered desk she inherited, injecting more funds, but the new stake-outs and hidden camera investigations don’t go as expected. Arab girl recruit Mouna Soualem’s dialogue with Bouillon shows an attitude that his more seasoned colleagues lack - a fascination with piecing together the facts of their investigations, more appealing to her than easy promotion.

La nuit du 12 - Grenoble memorial.

She and Grinberg are, as we might expect, the film’s most sympathetic characters. However this is not a re-run of current bloke bashing, despite indicators - “Most crimes are committed by men and most cops are men”, the squad ridiculing the young member’s belief in romance, Lanner’s disaster marriage or even Judge Grinberg’s dismissal of Bouillon’s jokey move on her - “Ne faites pas des bêtises!”  

Night of the 12th’s interrogations and cop conversations serve to illustrate  Grinberg’s assessment that current society is alarmingly distorting the way men and women relate -  violence endorsing rap songs, a lover who gets the giggles, sado-masochistic couplings and crazy idealisation. Even the loving family failed their daughter. When Grinberg’s character articulates this view, Moll is spelling it out for us - very bluntly German that - though the film is set in remote Grenoble and spoken in French.

Rather alarmingly, the published notices don’t seem to get it and they express dissatisfaction over the police procedural developments which we are shown, with deliberate emphasis, are not the point of the piece, even to the extent of a totally anti cop-movie conclusion.

Production values are modest - austere, effective film making and vivid performances. I’m not sure that Moll and his lot have completely solved the problems of going off tradition but Night of the 12 is still a class act.

The new English See How They Run is also a police investigation piece but it’s on the way to being polar opposite, jokey and with no pretense to realism. However a close reading proves it also is an attack on traditional form.

I homed in on this one because it shows the environment I shipped into. It is set in fifties London, still post war drab, where Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” is celebrating its hundredth live performance.

While there, I’d been cutting room junior on an Agatha Christie movie.  Writer (the novels that produced the Juliette Greco Whirlpool and the Jack Palance Ten Seconds to Hell) & films (the Dr. Kildares), Laurence P. Bachmann was studio head. He came back from a conference with the author where she had admired the cannon mounts being used as set decoration and asked for one for her garden. Larry Bachman observed “She must be tired of firing from the hip.” I was the only one who laughed.

With See How They Run the indicators are there from the start with a voice-over that uses what sound like one of those terrible American accents, RADA actors were proud of, until we realise it’s Adrian Brody as a blacklisted Hollywood director, nailing the voice perfectly. He’s been hired to adapt the play as a movie, though they can’t go into production till six months after the end of the first theatrical run. Pretty soon we get Haris Dickinson doing a mean take on Richard Attenborough, all chummy seriousness of purpose that doesn’t quite ring true, and Reece Shearsmith as John Wolf. The’re among the murder suspects that returned WW2 veteran Inspector Sam Rockwell and constable Saoirse Ronan (particularly winning at mixing gormless and conscientious) are investigating under the personal supervision of Commissioner Tim Key. Nice to find Shirley Henderson turning up unexpectedly and is that John Cleese unbilled, as one of the on-stage cast?

See How They Run - Rockwell & Ronan.

In with the farcical complications, the film has incidentals that give it surprise conviction. The shadow of WW2 hangs over it. There’s a glimpse of Rockwell as a separated dad hobbyist turning out a home jigsaw for his children. We get plausible period detail helped by shooting in locations like the Savoy and the real theater which were empty under Covid restrictions. This gets to be a distraction - where is that back street Soho pub? How come James Wolf’s office has posters for The African Queen and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which the real Wolf produced, next to one for the Mankiewicz No Way Out with which he had no known connection. I never met Wolf and have no idea whether he was actually doing his black P.A. but there were only a couple of balcklisted directors working in England at that stage (Edward Dmytrick had purged his guilt and Sam Wanamaker was still acting) and it’s far fetched to imagine serious minded Joe Losey or Cy Enfield showing up with a story board of a car chase and shoot out they proposed to introduce into an adaptation of “The Mousetrap”. As here, Losey did work with a West Indian writer, though.

Brody’s original exposition had him expressing contempt for the Agatha Christie conventions he’s called upon to use, the same ones we see being played out as the film progresses, in all their fake intensity - finding the body, interviewing character actor suspects, the mystery woman in Brody’s little red book, a gathering at the country house with the realisation that suspects are now potential victims.  

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Agatha Christie, something that is at once simple minded and deeply perverse, as suitable mass entertainment. René Clair made the only Christie adaptation I enjoy, casting comedians playing the characters straight, which gave And Then There Were None just the right note of artificiality. I don’t think any of the people I was working with had ever seen that one - maybe star, the endearing Margaret Rutherford.

 

The substance of See How They Run is that it is a critique of the Christie industry, which is still with us in the Branagh adaptations, just like The Night of the 12th, hoeing into the policier conventions. I’d like to watch See How They Run double billed with the Michael Apted 1979 Agatha, offering Vanessa Redgrave as an unbalanced version of the writer.  

I'd guess it's no accident that two substantial new theatrical releases feature passages that dismiss the films that precede them - Grinberg's analysis and Brody's voice over. Both films are saying that a twenty First Century audience needs to be fed something more aware.

Barrie Pattison 2022.