The allure of glib shorthand practically dictates that French writer-director Maïwenn’s gritty, garish new feature film, Polisse, be described as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Paris: The Movie. On the surface, such a comparison seems apt. Maïwenn’s film follows a fictional group of Parisian police detectives in the Child Protection Unit (CPU) as they tackle cases based on real-world incidents and anecdotes that the filmmaker uncovered during her research ride-alongs. Structurally and tonally, however, Polisse most resembles odd-duck “day-in the-life” episodes of the original Law & Order, such as “Mayhem” and “Aftershocks,” not to mention David Simon’s great American ur-tragedy, The Wire. Maïwenn’s film provides not a self-contained whodunit, but a sprawling tour of contemporary France’s rotten underside, where even her most jaded public servants routinely stumble upon horrors that beggar belief.
Co-written by the director and actor Emmanuelle Bercot (who also portrays one of the detectives), Polisse strives to emulate the erratic, exhausting rhythms of everyday police-work with a relentless, flitting structure. The one element that persists from scene to scene is the vague sense of a society that is close to unraveling. The CPU’s detectives pinball between countless cases, which never seem to stop piling up. Moreover, film deliberately provides little follow-up to the incidents of abuse and neglect, mimicking the detectives' constrained perspective. Once an arrest is made, the CPU’s attention shifts to the next victim, the nest molester, and the next baffling perversion. The police fill out their paperwork, then head out at shift’s end to drink and carouse into the wee hours, waking up the next day to do it all over again.
The cast of detectives is vast, but the film lingers on a few characters: Nadine (Karin Viard), a middle-aged mother enduring a divorce; her partner Iris (Marina Foïs), a hard-bitten woman with a sharp tongue; Fred (rapper Joeystarr), an kind-hearted agitator whose own family is coming apart; and Melissa (Maïwenn herself) a reserved photojournalist assigned to document the CPU’s routine. Everyone is troubled by personal demons and seems on the brink of either collapsing or boiling over. The script neatly packages shopworn character-based melodrama within a widening tone of dissolution and hopelessness, while editor Laure Gardette does a consummate job of evoking the buzzing, bleary sameness of the CPU's day-by-day slog through misery.
Unfortunately, the film's discursive leanings get the best of it at times, and Maïwenn is often distracted by soapy histrionics and sodden, pointless sequences unconvincingly passed off as character development. What's more, Polisse possesses a shallow righteousness, as though asserting the world's moral debasement were a bold statement. Still, there is a gratifying sincerity in the film's distinctly de-glamorized characterization of the Thin Blue Line. Serving with the Paris CPU is depicted as a kind of psychological martyrdom, and Maïwenn ultimately succeeds in conjuring clear-eyed sympathy for the men and women who allow themselves to be chewed up by such a thankless, unremitting job.
