If you follow the news from Europe, you already know that France has a lot of citizen protests, including one currently ongoing by French students who think schools should be well-funded and have adequate physical facilities and a full complement of teaching staff. One of the longer recent protests in France was the “Mouvement des gilets jaunes” or “Yellow Vest Movement” which ran from November 2018 to June 2020 (the name comes from the yellow safety vests that all French motorists are required to have in their vehicles). The immediate cause of the protests was a rise in the fuel tax, but the demands of the protestors also addressed broader societal issues like a minimum wage increase and a return of the “solidarity tax on wealth” levied on those with assets over 1.3 million euros.
Dominik Moll’s Case 137 takes on one unfortunate aspect of the Yellow Vest protests: police misconduct resulting in serious injuries to protestors. The story is fictional but is based on real events and the riot footage achieves a documentary realism to the point that you could sometimes forget you are watching actors performing a screenplay.
Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker) works for IGPN (French police internal affairs) and has the unenviable task of investigating cases of alleged police violence. As a cop whose job is investigating other cops often finds herself beset from both sides while trying to determine what is true and what is just. When we first meet see her, she’s reviewing a video of an incident in Paris in 2018 in which a clearly identifiable cop throws a stone at a group of protestors. When she confronts the stone thrower with the video, he claims his action was justified because he was defending his chief who had just been struck in the face with a rock, plus he was tired and aggravated after hours of dealing with defiant and sometimes violent protestors.
This is a case where it’s clear what happened but there’s no formula to balance the interests of the public (who rightly expect the police to act professionally and minimize harm) with that of someone for whom this is a first offense after 15 successful years on the job. Of course you could say it’s the first offense that we know about, but Bertrand has to make a decision based on the evidence before her, and she opts for mercy. Her tender heart is further underlined when we see her rescue and adopt a scrawny stray cat she names “Yoghurt” due to its fluffy white fur (revealed after she gives the cat a bath, guided by an internet video).
Bertrand’s next assignment gives the film its title: Case 137 involves a young man from Saint-Dizier (Guillaume Girard, played by Côme Péronnet) who is hospitalized with a skull fracture after being shot in the head by a flash-ball gun (a non-lethal weapon that can still inflict serious injuries). As it happens, Bertrand grew up in Saint-Dizier, a decaying area about 120 miles from Paris, and for that reason she makes an extra effort to get to the bottom of this case. In the process, she interviews countless protestors and police, and the overriding impression gained from those interviews is the difference in the demeanor of the two groups. The protestors are often defiant and mistrustful but also shocked at the level of police violence they witnessed, while the cops deliver their testimony with a practiced certainty that signals their belief in their own invulnerability as well as their disdain for the investigative process. Video also plays a key role in her investigation, but it’s a patchwork of footage from surveillance cameras and footage shot by private citizens, and people who have crucial footage may be reluctant to turn it over to the police.
Case 137 is an intricate police procedure held together by a strong and complex performance by Drucker, whose character gets a real education into the back end of the police force as well as how many people, including her own son, feel about them. It lacks the theatrics of the typical American procedural and Moll’s measured tone combined with a firehose of detail may be too much for some viewers, but if you’re prepared to engage seriously with this film it’s well worth the effort. It should be of particular interest to people in St. Louis for whom the Ferguson and Stockley protests are a recent memory. You might conclude, after watching this film, that the only solution is to prevent such situations from arising, because people who feel they are being heard don’t tend to resort to violence. But creating that world is easier said than done, particularly when so many people have an interest in protecting power imbalances as they currently exist. | Sarah Boslaugh
