112

The metallic din of a car crash heard off a black screen... A road at night... A guard rail broken off... A man looking down at a car overturned on its side in a ditch... The man getting back into his car and starting dialing 112 for emergency on his cell phone but not finishing his gesture... The man parking his car near an emergency call box but hesitating and not pressing the button...

Such is the beginning of "112", Pierre Alt's latest film to-date. Of course it can make you start wondering: is it going to be one of those films with a thesis, of the type André Cayatte once specialized in? Is it going to be a charge against hit and run drivers, complete with such questions hurled at you as "And you, what would you have done in the man's place" or "In your opinion, can this bad citizen benefit or not from extenuating circumstances?" And why not after all? Anyway, you are so abruptly projected into the dismayed driver's mind that you just can't help examining the issue. And as it is far from a silly one, is it that bad to be faced with it once in a while? However, the hypnotic, melodyless music that accompanies the images makes you feel a rat: with such a sound design, this movie is not going to be the illustration of a moral debate, or to be more to the point, it is not going to be just that. Indeed, guided unconsciously both by Samuel Brunel's very unsettling score and by Klaus-Peter Weber's nocturnal cinematography, you gradually sense that the "reality" you are given to see is only an illusion, or else if it IS reality then this reality is in fact permeated by fantasy. Just how, I cannot reveal here for fear of spoiling the final discovery, not unworthy of a tale by Edgar Poe for that matter. An ending that upsets you, makes you reconsider the whole film and want to see it again. As usual, Pierre Alt proves as good in the realistic sequences (in the flashback scenes he tells the viewer nearly as much about his main protagonist as Sautet, Guimard and Dabadie in "The Things of Life") as in the fantasy ones (in which he manages to instill anxiety without having to resort to a cascade of spectacular visual effects). Led by an excellent actor, Berlin-living Henry Arnold, who captures to perfection his character's deep sense of unease, this haunting tale presents another particularity : it was filmed on both sides of the French-German border (in Moselle and in Saarland) and spoken in the languages of the two countries. Just the path "Party Girl" would follow two years later... before winning the Golden Camera at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Our wish is that Pierre Alt, now at the top of his creative capacities, can soon turn to the feature-length format and be as successful as Claire Burger, Samuel Theis and Marie Amachoukeli.