At forty, Fabio goes with the flow. A little lost, he finds comfort in alcohol. And a little with Marie, twenty years his senior, with whom he has a secret relationship. One day, he receives a summons to serve as a jury member in a criminal court, where he will have to judge a young arsonist accused of manslaughter.
Lauded far beyond its station for its supposedly documentary side , "je le jure" is not groundbreaking at all ;from Lumet's "twelve angry men" (1957) to Eastwood 's
"juror 2"(2024 ) ,the subject was broached many times before;as for André Cayatte ,unfairly accused by Truffaut of turning the movie theater into a court , he already showed the jurors,summoned from different classes of the society ,and their personal influences on the verdict,and he did it in 1950,in "justice est faite" !And he knew what he was talking about ,he was trained as a lawyer.
That said , "je le jure" is not bad ; there are moving scenes ,notably the dead fire fighter's daughter's intervention ; the accused and his mother, totally overtaken by events ,unable to understand this "ceremonial " ,the jargon of these educated people .The arsonist has perhaps six lines to say , but both lawyers get the lion's share ;both put on their umpteenth act of the brilliant magistrate ; the jury reflects that : most of the time ,it's a dialogue between the GP and the long-haired teacher (in the grand tradition of may 68,although he's rather harsh on the accused) Their companions' interventions are timid, self-conscious ;as for the supposedly principal ,his part is reduced to a simple witness ,although his simple words ring true towards the ending .The barbecue with his family is revealing ;those naive-but eventually wise- people do not believe in justice for an accused person who can afford the best lawyers is sure to get away with his /her offense :there are plenty of examples among the politicians in France.
Some scenes are downright offtopic: the GP's problems she tells in minute details in the bar are insignificant; the final sequence is thoroughly unseemly ; if it means that the principal has become much more matured after the trial, it signally fails in its purpose for he plays a tiny part in the debate .
This tiny part is nonetheless important for he's one of these who feels the gap between the accused and the judges ; the arsonist lives in another world, his mind is absent ,he's not able to communicate,to translate his feelings into words. Without the poor daughter's intervention, It would verge on some kind of travesty of a trial .
