This French crime-drama probably won't appear in high street chain cinemas (to my knowledge), but if you get a chance, seek this out. Polisse (purposefully miss-spelt as though by a child) is a warts-and-all look at a year in the lives of police workers in a Child Protection Unit in Paris.
It's a real shame that the title is mis-leading and the description a little yawn-inducing. What sounds like a grim look at Paris' gritty underbelly is actually a sharply-written free-form drama composed of several vignettes that are by turns haunting, life-affirming, dramatic, and even surprisingly funny.
It's refreshing to see a serious and difficult subject being treated in this way. No dark blue/green shots of po-faced actors scowling as they recount the grim details of another child-prostitution ring here. If anything, the most striking element of many scenes (apparently all drawn from real events discovered while researching the film) is their sheer banality.
An early scene has an old man being summarily scolded by the CPU workers as he sheepishly denies the sexual abuse of his grand-daughter as though he were a boy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. It's awkward and jarring in its domesticity, particularly when contrasted with the tension and weight we might expect from an American drama (especially in the wake of the recent Sandusky case).
A later scene sees the workers practice their shooting in a firing-range, presented in a wonderfully breezy and irreverent way. It's a million miles from the seriousness of recent "séries polars" that have made their way to BBC4 over the years.
The cast is uniformly excellent, mostly comprised of star actors playing low-key every-men with a refreshing lack of ego. The stand-out however has to be newcomer Joey Starr, hitherto best known in France as an infamous rap-artist known for conspicuously lacking grace during interviews. He plays his character with maturity, depth, and range, never selling any emotion short in the more high-drama moments.
Some scenes are a little too on the nose, as is the case half-way in where a conservative male muslim refuses to be processed by a female worker, who in a grandstanding speech reveals herself to also be Muslim, proceeding to point out the lack of basis in the Koran for female oppression amongst Muslims. It is very timely given the anti-Islamic sentiment in France (the far-right party won third place in the General Election this year), but the lack of subtlety makes it stick out in this otherwise effortlessly naturalistic ensemble piece.
Another scene that generated some mixed response, most notably in my mind from Sight & Sound, is the one in which a group of CPU workers are interviewing a teenage girl who admits to performing oral sex to get her smartphone back. Despite their best efforts, the CPU staff begin laughing uncontrollably, cracking gallows humour one-liners as the puzzled victim looks on (e.g. "what would you do for a computer then?"). What appears as an insensitive and flippant treatment of a delicate situation is in my view a common response borne out of fatigue and stress that I have witnessed all too often in burnt-out staff on mental health in-patient wards. The laughter produced by such a moment is intelligent precisely because it is discomforting in the dissonance it creates. Such moments show that the workers we're following aren't wholly likeable and nor should they be; at the same time, when faced day-in day-out with child abuse cases it's natural to develop a dark absurdist humour as a defence mechanism; an identifiably human trait I recognise all too well from my own job.
The vignette style does mean a certain slapdash approach to continuity, and perhaps too much time is given to the private home-life of each worker, but all in all, I give Polisse 5 Jerry Sanduskys out of 5 (I am going to hell).
It's a real shame that the title is mis-leading and the description a little yawn-inducing. What sounds like a grim look at Paris' gritty underbelly is actually a sharply-written free-form drama composed of several vignettes that are by turns haunting, life-affirming, dramatic, and even surprisingly funny.
It's refreshing to see a serious and difficult subject being treated in this way. No dark blue/green shots of po-faced actors scowling as they recount the grim details of another child-prostitution ring here. If anything, the most striking element of many scenes (apparently all drawn from real events discovered while researching the film) is their sheer banality.
An early scene has an old man being summarily scolded by the CPU workers as he sheepishly denies the sexual abuse of his grand-daughter as though he were a boy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. It's awkward and jarring in its domesticity, particularly when contrasted with the tension and weight we might expect from an American drama (especially in the wake of the recent Sandusky case).
A later scene sees the workers practice their shooting in a firing-range, presented in a wonderfully breezy and irreverent way. It's a million miles from the seriousness of recent "séries polars" that have made their way to BBC4 over the years.
The cast is uniformly excellent, mostly comprised of star actors playing low-key every-men with a refreshing lack of ego. The stand-out however has to be newcomer Joey Starr, hitherto best known in France as an infamous rap-artist known for conspicuously lacking grace during interviews. He plays his character with maturity, depth, and range, never selling any emotion short in the more high-drama moments.
Some scenes are a little too on the nose, as is the case half-way in where a conservative male muslim refuses to be processed by a female worker, who in a grandstanding speech reveals herself to also be Muslim, proceeding to point out the lack of basis in the Koran for female oppression amongst Muslims. It is very timely given the anti-Islamic sentiment in France (the far-right party won third place in the General Election this year), but the lack of subtlety makes it stick out in this otherwise effortlessly naturalistic ensemble piece.
Another scene that generated some mixed response, most notably in my mind from Sight & Sound, is the one in which a group of CPU workers are interviewing a teenage girl who admits to performing oral sex to get her smartphone back. Despite their best efforts, the CPU staff begin laughing uncontrollably, cracking gallows humour one-liners as the puzzled victim looks on (e.g. "what would you do for a computer then?"). What appears as an insensitive and flippant treatment of a delicate situation is in my view a common response borne out of fatigue and stress that I have witnessed all too often in burnt-out staff on mental health in-patient wards. The laughter produced by such a moment is intelligent precisely because it is discomforting in the dissonance it creates. Such moments show that the workers we're following aren't wholly likeable and nor should they be; at the same time, when faced day-in day-out with child abuse cases it's natural to develop a dark absurdist humour as a defence mechanism; an identifiably human trait I recognise all too well from my own job.
The vignette style does mean a certain slapdash approach to continuity, and perhaps too much time is given to the private home-life of each worker, but all in all, I give Polisse 5 Jerry Sanduskys out of 5 (I am going to hell).
