“Case 137”, an interview with director Dominik Moll

Dominik Moll is back in Cannes with a new inextricable dilemma with a strong social-political background, “Case 137”. It is his third selection in the prestigious competition (he ran for the Palme d’Or in 2000 with “Harry, He’s Here to Help” and in 2005 with “Lemming”)

Three years ago, the quietly cult German-French director presented the terrific thriller doubling as a police procedural “The Night of the 12th” in the Cannes Premiere sidebar. With “Case 137”, he goes back to a police unit to observe how very real and very complex social issues are dealt with in those lacklustre police offices. This time, the main character, Stéphanie (brought to life in another flawless performance for Léa Drucker), is a police inspector working for internal affairs who is digging into a serious case of police brutality, in the wake of the Yellow Vests Protests, and finds herself – as both sides of the larger scale conflict keep standing their ground without budging – in a lonely position, stuck between a rock and a hard place, and in a procedural cul-de-sac, whilst an ever-expanding flow of videos and CCTV images help her as much as they hinder her investigation.

Dominik Moll tells us more about the situation and what led him to want to construct this nuanced film about the police and its place in society around an internal affairs inspector. He mentions how shocking certain cases of police brutality were, describes the panick caused by the Yellow Vests Protests for the authorities in place – or any movement now, including a cinematic recreation of a demonstration, as revealed by an anecdote that happened during the shoot! The director also points out the immediate need for the people in power to prevent demonstrations completely, and therefore the impossibility of dialogue, and underlines how images of all kinds have entered the picture.

Objectivity, bias, and videos

“The film, of course, does question objectivity and subjectivity and bias, and can a police officer investigate on other police officers without being biased, because he’s a police officer himself, and all those questions… As well as thefollowing: can an image, a video, be objective? Like ‘OK, now we have a video, we’ll see what happens’, so that’s an objective fact, but then everybody has a different interpretation. So everybody is there, with their own subjectivity, which will lead to different interpretations, and that is something I find really interesting.”

On using a sprawling number of images of all kinds as witnesses

“What struck me, when I was observing the police from within, especially with cases that concern violence during demonstrations, is that they spend a huge amount of time trying to find images and videos, to secure them. They have to look at social media, see if videos have been posted. And there were a lot of journalists too – some outlets were filming 24 hours a day… There’s a whole lot of footage and sometimes, for a single action, they find different angles… and that works with anything, so we immediately felt that this was very cinematic, even if those are videos, sometimes of poor quality, and that the investigation should be structured around those videos, which should be elements that allow Stéphanie to make progress in her investigation.”

A dynamic combination of genres

“Let’s say that the thriller is a framework, [one I like working with, and the idea is ] to construct the film in such a way that the audience gets drawn in, and wants to know what happens, and so you work with the codes of the genre to make the audience feel at ease, in a way, to make them feel that they’re in the right place, and then the genre allows you to weave inother topics, in this case the Yellow Vests Movement.”

On the social-political issues as stake

“The whole Yellow Vests movement was symptomatic; it showed the gap that exists between small cities and big cities, the country and the people in power. People felt like nobody looked at them – that’s why they wore high visibility vests, and wanted to see Macron… They just wanted to be seen… l found what happened to peaceful demonstrators such as the Girard family moving and revolting. They were on a family outing, they were going to demonstrate, do a bit of tourism in Paris, and then they find themselves in a nightmare, with very severe wounds, and then they’re being ignored again, because nobody ackowledges that they’ve been hurt. It’s like everybody’s saying: ‘Well, if you didn’t want to get hurt, why did you go to a demonstration?’ … You could feel that it was a tactic from the government, to scare people so that they don’t go and demonstrate. And it’s still true today, as we saw just recently on the 1st of May: it used to be a family outing, now nobody takes their children to demonstrations anymore… The Yellow Vests just wanted to take part in the democratic discussion, and all of this has been ignored.”

Plot