I'm not really sure how to rate this one; this story of a police officer investigating the rape and murder of a child is overlong, ponderous and meandering, but it has a haunting power and moments of unusually deep feeling which break through and rise above our usual experiences and expectations of a 'movie'.
The director, Bruno Dumont, follows on in the footsteps of Robert Bresson in casting only amateurs as his actors, which in most cases is very obvious (and in the case of the killer, probably detrimental) but results in an idiosyncratic sense of realism which stays in the mind. The greatest triumph of the film is the discovery and casting of Emmanuel Schotté in the lead as Pharaon: his portrayal of a man barely able to carry the death of his own wife and child while assaulted by all the beauty and unimaginable horror he encounters is one for the ages, and his Buster Keaton-like stone face seems to contain all the sorrows of the world. As far as I can see, he's only (briefly) acted once again since then, so he sort of belongs in that select group of folks like Maria Falconetti and Nadine Nortier who give the world one glowing scap of immortality and then leave the stage forever.
The ending puzzles me: once the murderer is discovered, Pharaon embraces him - actually kisses him - and, with an inscrutable expression and great purpose, leaves the room. Then the final shot is of Pharaon himself sitting in the police station in handcuffs. I intuitively take this to mean on some christlike level, Pharaon has reached a level of humanity in which he is prepared to take on all the sins of the world and change places with even the lowest of the low, but there's really not much more than Schotté's performance to lead me to this conclusion, and I can understand how many people would be frustrated and appalled by that as the payoff. The film doesn't succeed in any way as a typical police procedural, and so one's appreciation of it will entirely rest on how much they are prepared to accept it for its own thing. I was gripped by it throughout, but also felt it could have been more tightly made and much clearer in what it was trying to say.
The director, Bruno Dumont, follows on in the footsteps of Robert Bresson in casting only amateurs as his actors, which in most cases is very obvious (and in the case of the killer, probably detrimental) but results in an idiosyncratic sense of realism which stays in the mind. The greatest triumph of the film is the discovery and casting of Emmanuel Schotté in the lead as Pharaon: his portrayal of a man barely able to carry the death of his own wife and child while assaulted by all the beauty and unimaginable horror he encounters is one for the ages, and his Buster Keaton-like stone face seems to contain all the sorrows of the world. As far as I can see, he's only (briefly) acted once again since then, so he sort of belongs in that select group of folks like Maria Falconetti and Nadine Nortier who give the world one glowing scap of immortality and then leave the stage forever.
The ending puzzles me: once the murderer is discovered, Pharaon embraces him - actually kisses him - and, with an inscrutable expression and great purpose, leaves the room. Then the final shot is of Pharaon himself sitting in the police station in handcuffs. I intuitively take this to mean on some christlike level, Pharaon has reached a level of humanity in which he is prepared to take on all the sins of the world and change places with even the lowest of the low, but there's really not much more than Schotté's performance to lead me to this conclusion, and I can understand how many people would be frustrated and appalled by that as the payoff. The film doesn't succeed in any way as a typical police procedural, and so one's appreciation of it will entirely rest on how much they are prepared to accept it for its own thing. I was gripped by it throughout, but also felt it could have been more tightly made and much clearer in what it was trying to say.