SOPHIE QUINTON AND YVAN ATTAL IN 38 WITNESSES Bad witnessesLucas Belvaux's
Rapt, starring Yvan Attal, considered the moral ironies in a rich executive's kidnapping when his bad prior behavior emerges. In
38 Witnesses/38 Témoins the Belgian-born director known for his brilliant multi-genre Rashomon
Trilogy tackles another moral issue. He adapts a novel by Didier Decoin,
Est-ce ainsi que les femmes meurent ? ("Is This How Women Die?") based on the 1964 Kitty Genovese case of the woman in Queens whose rape and murder 38 witnesses were aware of but never called to report. The setting has been moved to Le Havre -- not the quaint, humanistic version given us in Aki Kaurasmäki's recent film, but anything but. Belvaux's filmmaking here is severely elegant, with some small sense of imploding Greek tragedy in it. And yet it's hard to care, and some of the emotion seems pushed. This Le Havre is gray and off-putting in harbor, building, and street, the objective correlative of soullessness and a frozen moral sense. While
Rapt was an intense thriller,
38 Witnesses (again starring Attal) is rather static, a long wait to find out that people didn't do anything, which we already knew. It's a grim, depressed film, impressive but without emotional impact. Belvaux has a great command of style, but one begins to see a cool indifference in his work.
Belvaux's digital widescreen images of cold-colored harbor industrial spaces and big cargo ships and a pilot boat roaring through a wintry sea are grand and terrifying and beautiful. They made me think of the much more layered and complex
Adieu by Arnaud des Pallières, which also deals with moral responsibility (it combines the issues of
Rapt and this and much more). Belvaux's shipping images, which show the power of the sea and of freight vessels, exude a sense of helplessness, especially through the effective use of sound design, which makes water and engines oppress us and seem alive -- more alive than any of the people in the film.
Pierre (Attal) is a harbor pilot, and he works at night; he lives in a spacious flat, gray like everything else, with big windows. It overlooks the place where a girl was brutally murdered. Her screams rang out. One man heard them and yelled; he is the only one at first who admits to police that he saw. Pierre's fiancee Louise (Sophie Quinton) works in shipping too, but she returns from a trip to China at the end of the fatal night.
The local journalist exploring the case, Sylvie Loriot (Nicole Garcia, as good as she can be in a conventional role) comes to question people, but at first only Louise will talk to her. Louise assumes Pierre didn't hear the violence, as he at first claims. But he has a doomed, grim look. He predicts the end of their relationship. It's all over before it's begun.
Everything in the film goes like this. It's all a foregone conclusion. What are we here for? To have the witnesses' cowardice and lying revealed. But we already know about them. To brood over the wrongness of it all.
On another night the increasingly desperate, guilt-ridden Pierre (who does he think he is, the murderer?) delivers a painfully overwrought, though whispered, soliloquy as he sits near the sleeping Louise that in effect finishes off the film by removing whatever element of naturalism or dramatic truth it might have contained. It may have seemed necessary to explicate his sense of guilt at having heard everything and gotten up and looked and then still done nothing, but the whispered speech exemplifies
38 Witnesses' art-film lack of realism and ordinary detail. Everything is grandly, coldly staged; nothing is naturalistic and specific. Is this what Belvaux has always done? The cold relentlessness worked splendidly in
Rapt, but here, it's the kiss of death, because we need to see little people feeling guilty and responsible. Instead we get a grandiose sense of doom.
Louise is sleeping but "hears" the soliloquy and thinks it's a dream, but Pierre confesses it's true. His next step is to go to the police. The commissioner's first choice is not to do anything because there are too many guilty people to prosecute. But then an uneasy cop (François Feroleto) tells Sylvie and she writes the silent witness story. This forces the cops to go back to the people in the building, who admit they had lied when they said they heard nothing. The cops stage a "recreation" of the crime and the witnessing of it and then Louise, who had pledged to stay by Pierre, announces that she is leaving him.
Belvaux is at the top of his game, but in things that don't matter. A frantic drive around the port by Louise looking for Pierre is superfluous, but has terrific rhythm and visual style. A man alwyas staring at Pierre from a balcony across the street is silly but elegantly shot. But these are pointless gestures, and the essential is missing. A curious casualty of the storytelling is the police procedural aspect, which is barely touched on -- except for the few final minutes, which are terrifying and yet somehow seem thrown away, almost an afterthought, an obligatory gesture and nothing ore, however well done.
The stars of
38 Witnesses, despite the well-meaning efforts of Nicole Garcia and Yvan Attal, are the great container ships and the dockyard cranes and the big apartment buildings with their disquieting spaces and sounds, the digital cameras with their excellent lenses manned by dp Pierric Gantelmi d'Ille, and the mikes manned by Henri Morelle that have caught the sounds of the sea and engines and cries of the victim and someone reenacting her final ordeal.
38 Témoins will be released in France March 14, 2012. It debuted at Rotterdam, where it was the opening night film, and was screened for this review at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center in preparation for the UniFrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, where it will be shown to the public three times at two locations, the IFC Center and the Walter Reade Theater:
Fri., March 2, 7pm – IFC; Sat., March 10, 6:15pm – WRT; Sun., March 11, 1:30pm – WRT
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