DRAMA; 1hr 55min (French with subtitles)
STARRING: Daniel Auteuil, Grégory Gadebois, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Aurore Auteuil, Gaëtan Roussel
Appassionato: Auteuil
Maître Jean Monier (director Auteuil) only agrees to conduct the 2017 custodial interview of accused killer Nicolas Milik (Gadebois, emoting like the clappers) as a favour to his wife and fellow lawyer, Annie (Borgen ’s Babett Knudsen), who doesn’t feel like schlepping to the cop shop at night. Prosecutor Jean hasn’t defended a case in 15 years after inadvertently enabling a guilty man’s acquittal. But Nicolas’s frantic demeanour and terrible plight speak to him enough to take up his daunting cause.
Nicolas tearfully claims that on the night of her horrendous death, he and his wife, Cécile, argued when she was drunk, which apparently was most of the time, and she stormed out — for a date with a throat slasher, as it tragically happens — leaving him to pick up the slack with their five children. Not that Nicolas was a candidate for sainthood, either, according to Cécile’s bitter sister, Audrey (Aurore Auteuil). “He ate up her life,” she snarls at an unwelcome Jean.
Then, too, there’s the complication of Nicolas’s belligerent friend, Roger (Roussel), in whose bar he sought solace after Cécile’s drunken flounce. Roger, who was also drunk and hostile, berated Nicolas for allowing Cécile to walk all over him — some solace — and could well have abetted him in her murder, being that he was MIA for two hours afterwards and coolly informed his wife, Laure (Florence Janas), that “I fucking did it.” The only certainty is that someone savagely did.
Auteuil’s considered direction of his and co-screenwriter Steven Mitz’s adaptation of the late Jean-Yves Moyart’s 2021 memoir moves with a tactician’s care between then and now, with Nicolas’s three-day 2020 trial as its connective spine. The tone is sombre and moodily lit, with an exhausted, obsessive Jean the eye of its gathering storm. As an honourable man with a haunted past, squaring up solo to the burden of proof, Jean’s conviction must necessarily be absolute. Not until the final shocking minutes is it clear whether that certainty will be enough.
