On the morning of May 14, 2013, the body of Maud Maréchal, 21, was found charred in a town in the department of Seine-et-Marne. His murderer is still at large. In his documentary 18.3. A year at PJ, Pauline Guéna documents several investigations, including this one. Fascinated by the way the author describes both the daily lives of police officers and how they are haunted by certain unsolved cases, Dominik Moll was inspired by this feminicide for his film The night of 12winner of six César awards, including those for best feature film, best adapted screenplay and best director.
A deserved plebiscite. Fact, The night of 12 is of rare power. In this fictional version, the young victim is called Clara Royer. One evening when she has just left the home of her best friend Stéphanie (Pauline Serieys), she comes across a hooded guy in a deserted street who, without warning, sprays her with petrol.
At dawn, a team of the judicial police led by Captain Yohan Vivès (Bastien Bouillon) is dispatched to the scene.
With a keen sense of narrative follow-up, Dominik Moll puts in place all the significant elements of the story, but without ever drawing attention to them. It’s onlya posteriori meaning emerges.
For example, we immediately find ourselves in the presence of an exclusively male police force. However, between the horror of the still very much alive murder and the investigation which begins, one hardly makes case of it. Then, during a discussion between colleagues, one of them noted that historically, it is always the women who are burned and that “it is the men who hold the matches”…
Finally, towards the end, a woman joins the team: Nadia (Mouna Soualem, with sober authority). And it is there, really, that we see the magnitude of the problem, yet “shown” from the start by the filmmaker. A problem that Nadia, who does not have the same perspective as her colleagues, summarizes to Yohan as follows: “It’s still curious that the majority of crimes are committed by men and that afterwards it is other men who investigate above. Is the only place left to women that of victim? »
At this point, Yohan has come a long way and is ripe to not only hear, but discern the truth in this reflection. It is that upstream, two other women will have in turn recarded and enlightened. It’s intentional, as the filmmaker explained to us in an interview: “The character of Yohan evolves through contact with female characters, whose words are the most important. »
The friend and the judge
First comes the moment when, exasperated that the police constantly reduce the murder of her friend to the number of boys she dated during her lifetime, Stéphanie says to Yohan: “Has she slept, has she that she has not slept: what difference does it make? She didn’t commit a crime! You want to know why she got killed? She got killed because she was a girl. That’s it that’s all. It was a girl. »
This scene, which occurs right in the middle, puts the finger on the sore, or rather, drives it into the wound. It also features a pair of remarkably accurate interpretations by Pauline Serieys and Bastien Bouillon.
The other female character who helps Yohan to get rid of his blinders is the investigating judge (Anouk Grinberg, all calm strength) who, after three years, decides to reopen the investigation. She is the one who will push the policeman plagued by a feeling of failure to take everything back.
And the cop still shaken to confide: “I am convinced that if we did not find the assassin, it is because it is all the men who killed Clara. It’s something that’s wrong between men and women. »
And his interlocutor to answer him, with an eloquent mixture of indulgence and empathy: “I am a woman. I am an investigating judge. I would have to be blind not to know that there is something wrong between men and women. »
Such exchanges, targeted, chiselled, punctuate The night of 12which brilliantly merges the social and the procedural.
A film lesson
Visually, this is Dominik Moll’s most accomplished staging, revealed at the turn of the 2000s with the sinister Harry, a friend who wishes you well And Lemming.
It is, paradoxically, his realization where he seems to do the least, but where he actually accomplishes the most. A real lesson in cinema.
Between the initial sequence where Yohan pedals in a circular circuit which, by definition, goes nowhere, to the final sequence where he trains on a mountain path, high up now, the protagonist is no longer quite the even. And perhaps, we insist here on the masculine, the spectator either.