Dossier 137 – first-look review

In late 2018, France ground to a halt on the back of the “gilet jaune” protests in which naffed-off labourers downed tools and expressed their grief on the streets. In Paris, members of the law-enforcement anti-terrorist brigade (BRI) were given a remit to tool up as quickly as possible and take whatever steps were necessary to calm tensions and suppress those protestors who were deemed a public menace. Get your helmets in from the local sports department store; pick up your anti-riot guns from the station.

This new film by reliable French director Dominik Moll zeroes in on the fate of a single teenager who, as the result of this open remit, is shot in the face and suffered life-altering brain damage as a result. Léa Drucker’s Stéphanie heads up an internal affairs unit – the person who polices the police – looking into the incident and the rogue band responsible for destroying this person’s life.

Yet it’s not so easy as just amassing the evidence and making the culprits pay. The BRI were riding a national PR high after their bravery following the 2015 siege of the Bataclan music venue, and so they now possess the image as France’s last line of defense against violent chaos. Stéphanie must tread carefully and cautiously in order to bring the net up and around her suspects, but all the members of the unit are united in their denial that any such malfeasance occurred on that fateful evening.

The first half of Case 137 is its most interesting, where Moll grinds down into the micro details of the investigation and showcases all the tools at Stéphanie and her team’s disposal. There are points where the film feels like an innovative desktop procedural where we snap back and forth between layers of windows, seeing videos of all different formats and resolutions and special data mapping software used to create a minute-by-minute sense of how things escalated up to and after this moment. It’s almost like how movies are made!

Yet in its second half, the film shifts into a more conventional moral debate about the issues that such a case throws up: whether police solidarity should be maintained in all instances so as to maintain the illusion of strength and order, or should the bad eggs be punished as a way to demonstrate that the police are not an impenetrable and monolithic unit who formulate the rules as they go along.

Drucker is reliably superb at the centre of the melee, often herself choosing to go off grid in order to secure vital evidence for her case. Which itself poses the question of how is this different to what the BRI officers did? The film ends up ultimately both-sidesing the question, suggesting that the deeper that you search for moral equilibrium and fairness in the eyes of all the relevant parties, the more complex things become. The film certainly canters along at a fair clip, and works as a fun police procedural, but it ends up spoonfeeding the issues rather than having them ascend naturally from the story.

To keep celebrating the craft of film, we have to rely on the support of our members. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.