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Film Reviews

The Night of the 12th

Published October 14, 2022
Vivès and Marceau surprised by a sudden plot development

Never has a whodunnit been less dependent on suspense than Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12th. At the very beginning we are told the French Criminal Investigation Department opens 800 murder investigations every year. “Some are never resolved,” we read. “This film is about one of these.”

Even though we know this is the story of an unsolved case, we constantly feel as if a breakthrough might be hiding around every corner. On the surface, the movie is a deadpan police procedural in which the detectives employ all the usual techniques to track down a murderer. On a deeper level, it’s a profoundly disturbing plunge into the dark recesses of the human psyche.

This is familiar territory for Moll, whose previous feature, Only the Animals(2019), was one of the most original films of the year. The director’s style is restrained to the point of introversion, but as the minutes tick by, we become progressively more immersed in the world he is describing. The Night of the 12th is based on a real police investigation, but the setting has been changed from Versailles, outside of Paris, to a small town near Grenoble, which provides a more claustrophobic atmosphere.

From the first minute, when we see Clara (Lulu Cotton-Frapier), an attractive young woman, leaving a friend’s house in the small hours of the morning, we know she won’t make it home. Her killer is swift and brutal, his identity concealed by a hood.

The detectives assigned to the case, Captain Yohan Vivès (Bastien Bouillon) and his older partner, Marceau (Bouli Lanners), begin the investigation in a methodical manner, staking out the crime scene and collecting forensic evidence. Vivès and another cop have the grisly duty of alerting Clara’s mother that her daughter has been murdered, then dealing with the hysterical reaction.

The nature of the murder suggests it was motivated by extreme hatred, or a need for revenge, but according to the victim’s best friend, Stephanie (Pauline Serieys), Clara was a sweet, good-natured person with no enemies. Did she have a boyfriend? Yes, a bartender named Wesley. Were there other sexual partners? Jilted and jealous lovers?

As Vivès and Marceau deepen their investigation into Clara’s love life, they meet with one creepy male after another. Wesley, for instance, who tells them he already has a regular girlfriend, and only allowed himself to be “tempted” by Clara. Then there’s Jules, who laughs at a private joke while he discusses the murder, and Gabi who wrote a violent rap song after Clara broke up with him, saying she deserved to be torched. There’s Daniel, a deadbeat who lives in a shack, who claims to have been one of her lovers; and Vincent, a macho sociopath with a conviction for beating up his ex-wife. One begins to wonder if the French have a collective noun for inappropriate relationships.

We meet these characters with horror and disbelief, feelings echoed by Vivès and Marceau. How did so many young men from one small part of France develop such cynical, selfish, and brutal attitudes towards women? Clara’s lovers have nothing in common apart from a callous frame of mind. As one interview follows another, the policemen feel their own disgust increasing, along with a growing sense of unreality.

The case becomes bound up with each man’s private preoccupations. Vivès is a bachelor who lives in a bare, fastidiously neat apartment. He is respectful of women to the point of being angered by crude comments made by his colleagues, but otherwise has nothing to do with them. Marceau, who is breaking up with his wife, is feeling stressed and edgy.

Vivès has an obsessive-compulsive streak. He regularly rides a bicycle around a lonely velodrome, in what soon becomes a symbol for an investigation going around in circles. When he allows Marceau to sleep on his couch, he issues instructions that he must pee strictly within the toilet bowl.

Marceau is sensual and temperamental. He quotes poetry by Verlaine, and says he should have been a French teacher rather than a cop. The dissociated attitudes of the guys they are interviewing send him into a fury. “It’s a weird job we do,” he says to his partner, but this case is more than weird, it has become traumatic.

As the story progresses, we feel chilled by the things a group of apparently ordinary men take for granted. It’s a level of misogyny that seems more existential than cultural, as if it’s never occurred to them that women might be anything but sexual objects to be used and discarded. At the same time, they can become violently angry if a woman decides to break off a relationship. It’s an unstable mix of masculine pride and anxiety. It seems to be a feature of the region, but Vivès begins to feel it’s endemic to relations between the sexes.

“There’s something amiss between men and women,” he says to the female magistrate (Anouk Ginsberg) who insists a new investigation be opened three years after the first has lapsed. This is Vivès’s coded way of confessing the case has not only haunted him, it has permanently scarred his view of male-female relations. It’s not simply a matter of deciding which one of Clara’s lovers was capable of such a sadistic murder, because all of them were capable. Vivès begins to believe she was murdered by “men”, rather than a lone psychopath. It’s hard to see the killer as a homocidal maniac when contempt for women is the social norm.

It’s only towards the end, when Vivès is able to talk with a new female recruit, Nadia (Mouana Soulem), that he starts to release some of the tensions that have made him such a bottled-up personality. At this point, any film critic might prefer to hand over to a psychoanalyst, as Vivès begins to break free of the murder that has haunted him for years, and the impossible jumble of feelings and ideas that have accrued around Clara and the banal, gruesome men to whom she gave herself. Vivès’s liberation is as mysterious as his entrapment. The fear, hatred and insecurity, that has been festering beneath his air of steely competence, is dissipated in the most ordinary manner. It leaves us wondering, not for the first time in this film, where normality ends, and strangeness begins.

The Night of the 12th

Directed by Dominik Moll

Written by Gilles Marchand & Dominik Moll, after a book by Pauline Guéna

Starring: Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Lulu Cotton-Frapier, Mouna Soulem, Pauline Serieys, Anouk Grinberg, Baptiste Perais, Jules Poirier, Benjamin Blanchy, Charine Paul, Matthieu Rozé, Pierre Lottin, Nathanaël Beausivoir

France/Belgium, rated M, 114 mins

 

Published in the Australian Financial Review, 15 October, 2022