Le Petit Lieutenant

Nathalie Baye shows off her credentials

“Le Petit Lieutenant” is, above all things, a message movie. Every frame of it is dedicated towards conveying this important moral tidbit: policework is not glamorous. Regardless of what all those other movies about cops might make you think, actually being a cop is both stressful and boring at the same time. The work is mostly mundane, routine, and anticlimactic, and underneath that is the possibility that you or someone you know (and even like) could die on the job. Being a cop is dull. Deadly dull.

How do you make a movie about dullness that isn’t a dull movie? Xavier Beauvois effectively answers that question, but not with triumph; rather, by failing in the first half, and then suceeding in the second. The key turns out to be who is in front of, not behind, the camera.

“Le Petit Lieutenant” is a police procedural in the most literal sense of that term: it’s a dramatic study of procedure, involving police. Rookie cop Antoine (played by Jalil Lespert) leaves his provincial hometown for the bright lights and big city of Paris, hoping to find more action and excitement there, of the homicidal type. “There’s maybe one murder a year in my hometown,” he mourns. Naturally, we also expect something interesting to happen to him in Paris, especially after he meets “supercop” Caro Vaudieu. But nothing much happens. We meet the guys in the office. There’s some interdepartmental whining. There’s some racial tension. The we meet the guys in the office again, but now they’re in a bar. Antoine misses his wife, and then goes to see her. They have a fight, and then make up, and then make love.

The tedium might be bearable if it weren’t so, well, tedious – the director has nothing to add to the vocabulary of the procedural, and falls back on such reliables as cutting through traffic by turning on the siren and scoring some pot from the guys in the NARC unit. Even “Superbad” was more creative with its policemen — and they were stereotypes on purpose — than this.

There’s an old movie cliche that in a bad scene, the wall hangings are more interesting than what’s going in between the characters. That’s literally true here. The walls of the police station are, oddly, plastered with posters of movies about cops and robbers – “Reservoir Dogs,” “Serpico,” etc. The point, being, I suppose, that even the cops find cop movies more interesting than actually being cops.

Caro, played by Nathalie Baye, is a recovering alcoholic, back on the force after years away recovering from the death of her son. She takes a maternal interest in Antoine; an interest that, given the right circumstances, might possibly become romantic. But those circumstances never appear; the movie makes a deft left turn when Antoine is critically injured and ends up in a coma. (This ought to hit the viewer like a hammer, but instead it feels curiously limp and distant.) His absence does enhance the last half of the movie, as Nathalie Baye takes over as the camera’s favorite. She is an actress of great depth and grace, and it is a small pleasure to watch her. She has several very good, though admittedly small, scenes, as she battles her own demons and wearily hunts down Antoine’s attacker, though he is no one interesting and catching him brings her no peace or relief. The film ends in a closeup on her face, a face worth studying.

The message of Le Petit Lieutenant is clear: if you’re going to make a movie that is slow, quiet, and not about much, make sure to get an actor or actress who can stand still in front of a camera, say nothing, and still captivate an audience. Nathalie Baye has that talent; Jalil Lespert does not. Half this movie is watchable.

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