A Confusing Imaginary Life and a Tense Police Drama

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It is within just such a superbly realized rendering of an admittedly conventionalized context — we've been in this police station a hundred times in the course of our moviegoing lives — that Le Petit Lieutenant functions so hypnotically. It's title character is a new graduate of the police academy who leaves his wife and child behind in Normandy to take an assignment in Paris because that's where the action is. He is named Antoine and he's played by an actor named Jalil Lespert, who is not Bernal-cute — he is, in fact, almost anti-handsome — but is completely persuasive as an innocent who is eager to learn from and fit in with the old pros of his unit. His first case appears to be a routine one; an English professor has been mugged, severely wounded and dumped in a canal, by what appear to be low-level Russian immigrant toughs. Plodding police procedures will eventually reveal them to be somewhat more dangerous, with better underworld connections, than anyone at first imagined.

But Le Petit Lieutenant's real distinction arises from the character Baye plays. She's the officer in charge of Antoine's unit — not that any huge feminist point is made of her new assignment; she's just the best person for the job. But she has a backstory; she lost a child to meningitis and has become a now-recovering alcoholic as a result. We see her attending AA meeting, we worry about her ability to stay sober under pressure and we increasingly admire her cool competence and, when the chips are down, her bravery under fire. Baye underplays her, but she also touches her with humanity. She is a rather solitary person and the movie conveys that very efficiently. She is also a woman capable of brisk command, watchful patience and, yes, wistful feelings for her eager young lieutenant. All of these are conveyed with great subtlety by Baye, who defines for us the both the mature beauty and the mature knowingness of the "woman of a certain age" in a context where, as far as I know, these qualities have never before been situated. Baye won her third Cesar (the French Oscar) for this performance.

Her romance with Antoine never advances beyond sharing a joint with him that she has purloined from the cops' evidence room, but there is great tenderness in their relationship. And, eventually, a tragedy that is both utterly surprising and utterly believable. This is not a movie that bears the slightest comparison to American films in the same genre. It is very short on car chases and gun fights. And can you imagine, say, Bruce Willis's thoughts turning to Mozart as he witnesses his first autopsy? What it offers instead is an almost casual, but steadily tightening, behavioral authenticity that is rare enough in any movie and virtually unheard of in crime pictures.

Naturally, one worries about its American fate. This has been, so far, a very good year for films from abroad — Army of Shadows (an anti-heroic resistance drama), District B13 (a brilliant reimagining of the action movie), Only Human (an insanely funny Spanish farce). All have been critically well-received. None has made anything than a faint blip on the commercial radar. Yet all constitute great answers to that question most commonly asked of critics: Have you seen any good movies lately? We have, and we have responded with enthusiastic hearts. The trouble is that you can't see them — unless you live in a big city where some rather wan art house clings to life and you're quick off the mark to catch their one or two week runs. It's a stupid system — or, rather, non-system — but the largely unsatisfied hunger for satisfying movies abides. It would be nice if the studio classic divisions put some effort into gratifying that growling need, instead of giving us chic nonsense that does not explicate the science of sleep so much as induces a serious case of the noddies.